On the Uses of Friends Lists

MMORPGs, by their massiveness, and their role-playingness, are close to social networks. There is still plenty to be done, however, to come close to social networks in terms of interactivity. One step in the right direction would be the addition of friends/enemies lists.

You can tell a lot about someone by who their friends are, and the same should apply to MMORPGs. If you have a griefer, content in disrupting other people's fun, they will get lots of enemies, which might be a good way for game masters to find them. On the other hand, someone who gets lots of friends is probably someone you want to group with, since he's proven many times that he's friendly, reliable, or maybe just knows how to write.

But that can't be the end of things, otherwise groups of griefers would call each other friends and get themselves good reviews. You also have to watch who someone hangs with; if someone only ever gets good reviews from people inside a small clique, who all get bad reviews from outsiders, then you can tell people that they are unlikely to want to befriend these people.

Going further, you will realize not all nice people want to associate with other nice people. Role-players will want to associate with role-players, achievers with achievers; casual players will hang with their kin, as will hardcore ones; and people with a basic grasp of grammar will want to listen to people who can likewise spell correctly, while that kind of behavior would be infuriating to Internet-spellers.

So a high friendliness rating would tell you that a person is likely to be like-minded to you, while a lower one might indicate that they are either griefers, or simply different-minded.

Of course, as always, I leave to the programming team the task of designing such a feature. Us designers can't be bothered with details such as 'feasibility'.

The Role of Non-Player Characters

Friendly NPCs in MMORPGs nowadays are usually one of two things: either they're super-humans who send the player on quests they can't be bothered to complete themselves, or, more commonly, they're there to perform repetitive tasks that explicitly serve the players.

The problem with that is that NPCs don't have a purpose, a reason for doing what they do. That NPC vendor will buy any crap you send their way, no matter how useless it might be, and with only indication of price the level of the creature which dropped it. That is wrong on many, many levels.

Non-player characters should have their own purpose, which serves their own interest. They will not buy items that the players don't want, because they can only do what players can do. NPC vendors should not be used as trash cans for players to dump their unwanted loot to. They don't need bear gallbladder. They need iron, wood, cloth, sugar and herbs, for which they will compete with the players. Should players run NPCs out of business, they will attempt to start over again, perhaps in another city, or they might offer their services for more menial tasks (Such as vendors for lazy players).

NPCs should follow the same rules that dictate the actions of players; they should have the same skill system, stats, equipment, and be governed by the same rules that govern players; NPCs simply don't pay monthly fees, so they don't mind being used for menial tasks.

When that mentality of NPCs-like-players is achieved, we can see a MMORPG that achieves a reasonable amount of immersiveness.

On the Edge of Gameplay

I know I said I wouldn't talk too much about myself, but there is one particular bit of game experience which clings forever in my memory, and I think it is particularly meaningful in explaining the type of game I would like a MMORPG to be.

The setting is World of Warcraft, the Deadmines (Low-level party instance). The party is sub-optimal, consisting of a paladin as the only healer, the only one capable of casting resurrection AND the only one being above minimum level for this instance; the rest of the party was made of tanks and damage dealers (Did I ever mention how opposed to gnome warriors I am?). I was playing a rogue; this is important.

Needless to say, this was a hard win, but we progressed onward anyway, despite a large number of near-wipes. Once, the whole party, minus the paladin, was killed; the paladin saved his own life by jumping down in the water, a feat NPCs aren't smart enough to accomplish. This allowed him to climb back up and resurrect the rest of us.

Now, we cleared most of the instance, but the final boss would have been a problem. Simple tactics working best, we decided to target the boss only to get credits, ignoring its friends. The fight went on, and after much damage taken, the boss dropped; our own party did soon after. Now, the rest of the party all did their looting, taking one head of the boss each (Yes, each got one head of the human boss. That's MMORPG rules for you), except myself; so into the fight was I, that I forgot to do it. Everyone being dead, and having finished their quests, it was decided that we wouldn't be fighting through all the respawns again just so that dumb little rogue could get his quest done. Then it dawned to me that as a rogue, I could use stealth to go right through all the respawns to get to the boss.

The party disbanded (I think the paladin stayed in the party, curious to know how I did; he didn't help in the sneaking part, unfortunately), and I returned again to the instance entrance. I sneaked past the encounters, feeling the adrenaline rush through, as if a single one of them saw me, it would undoubtedly be the end of me.

Long sneaking quest made short, I managed to go through the whole instance in stealth mode, all alone, and reached the boss' corpse, only to see that it had de-spawned in the mean time.

Gah.

A few weeks later, Blizzard increased the de-spawn time of bosses.

Gah!

Epilogue

So little Hexedian the gnomish rogue might not have been the best at sneaking part guards, but one thing hits me when I recall this story. I've played a character to level 50, and a couple more to mid-level; I've done Shadowfang Keep, Gnomeregan, The Scarlet Monastery, Uldaman and even ZulFarrak; I have tried a wide range of content in the game; and yet, despite all this, the one bit of gameplay that always comes to mind when I think of World of Warcraft is a failed instance run I did with a secondary character. The game I played wasn't even part of World of Warcraft's intended gameplay; the quest to sneak past all the guards didn't exist, yet it might be the most enjoyable moment of all my WoW history.

I think MMORPGs should have more Hex the rogue moments, where the events that happen are what players make of them, not what was scripted to happen. Gameplay will emerge by itself if you let it do so, and do not constrain the game with artificial limitations.

I hope my story, while not the most interesting one around, at least managed to entertain you, and give some kind of idea as to what I envision of a game.

On Ethics

While ethics are not typically elements of a classic MMORPG, we can't forget the influence of virtues in Ultima Online. Ethics, however, are typically presented in a simplified manner, offering the player with the choice of being good, or getting a bigger reward. Never have ethics been about who to save when you can't save everyone, or whether or not two wrongs will make a right.

I believe that ethics, that is, the theory of good and evil, have the potential of creating a classic of gaming that would transcend gaming and become part of history. For that to happen, however, a great deal of attention would have to be placed on making ethics part of the game itself; simply making it an afterthought would, like many other features, only serve to weaken the general game experience.

For ethics to play a major role, two things need to happen. First and foremost, ethics have to influence the game world. That means players and NPCs should have a way to know another player or NPC's ethics, be it magic, psychology, reputation or stats display (I wouldn't recommend the last one; breaks the game immersion). Based on someone's ethics, players can decide whether they will befriend them or not; they will decide if they want to hunt them down, or maybe just ask vendors to charge more to them. This does not only apply to being Good, of course; player-run bandit cities wouldn't accept no goody-two-shoes paladin or law enforcers.

Before a system to make ethics worthwhile can be useful, you will need a way to influence ethics. PKs and griefers will go down fast, while charities and evil-slayers will be praised world-wide; even small things, like over-using a bargaining position, could influence ethics in small ways. Reputation could also be influenced by whom the player hangs with; a player performing Good acts to infiltrate an enemy organization, but who is often seen in the company of openly evil people, would have a hard time keeping his notoriety up; and don't even think of infiltrating evil cities when you can't even kick a beggar.

With that being said, it is important not to fall into easy traps of ethics; players should be able to interact with other players of widely different ethics, without there being penalties to anything but reputation (Unless the laws of the lands are specific about such dealings). There cannot be an easy way to influence ethics too much, such as making large donations, otherwise it might be easily exploitable (Unless you want to have exploitable reputation changes; donations to churches have been known throughout western history to erase all of a noble's evil deeds). Similarly, few things short of killing large numbers of innocents without a good reason would make a player look evil enough in a short amount of time.

If you have accessible ways to enable people to see other people's ethics, you could have a way to hide one's ethics. If you have magic detection, you can have magical hiding or forgery. With psychology, you have reverse-psychological poker-face feigning. Reputation can be altered with well-placed bribes or blackmail.

If ethics are to have a central role in a MMORPG, they could easily become multi-layered, letting players choose their own paths of virtues. Players could be asked to choose between the mutually exclusive loyalty, justice, freedom and happiness, with neither being the true Good choice, but still sparking conflicts within defenders of different virtues. Evil players could likewise decide to take the route of the murderer, blackmailer, burglar or public streaker. Thief guilds could instill a limit to the number of murders members can have within time periods, which would both serve to insure relative anonymity and reasonable member skills (Good thieves don't get caught).

When all is said and done, that players have chosen their factions and are waging war, you start reaping the benefits of your choices. Good players have a greater affinity to Holy magic and empathic skills, while evil ones will take their picks of a greater selection of demons and curses to unleash on their opponents. Even the balanced or undecided players could benefit, with access to both, and greater powers with certain non-aligned arts and mercantile skills.

In the end, the incorporation of a well-thought ethics system, by itself, wouldn't be enough to create a classic out of a mediocre game; taken in coordination with a well-polished game, however, it could pave the way to an era of games challenging both the minds and spirits of gamers - pave it with solid gold.

I Play to be Challenged

I think the biggest problems in MMORPGs today are that they aren't designed, from the start, to challenge players, but rather to give them means to gain more power. For players like me, this is wrong; I don't want to be told I'll gain new power if I kill three dozens more of those orcs. I want the game to show me a scenario, and to tell me "Ok, this is what you know, now find a way to win this." This can be achieved with reasonably truly random enemies, challenging battles or crafting games which use the players' skills.

Players like me (And I know there's a whole underdeveloped market to be exploited for our demographic) want a game where the story happens all the time; a game where 'monotony' means 'only three new enemies to wipe today'; a game where stuff actually happens, which might scare proponents of static dungeons, but would represent a seven-leagues-boots lunar-gravity leap forward for those of us for whom the bragging right of being the first to complete static dungeon #176 for the metric umpteenth time doesn't portray a perfect world.

In my unloved demographic view, a game has to have actual unpredictable elements to be considered a game, otherwise, it's just a player-paced story, revolving around yet another hero in a world of heroes.

Aaaand that's all the ramblings you will get from this weblog. I'll be back to writing insightful and revolutionary ideas next time, I promise.

Rethinking the MMO

There's an awesome article down at Gamasutra about, you guessed it, MMORPGs. Go read it. You'd think that guy was a long-time reader of Thoughts of a roleplayer =P

Skill Cooldown

Typical MMORPG behavior includes cool-down periods for skills, particularly spells, which means those skills cannot be used for a period of time after being used, presumably because the character is tired, and to prevent over-usage of a single, powerful skill. This cooldown period also exists for some items, for example potions, and is sometimes shared between skills and potions - fireball 17 has the same cooldown has fireball 1 through 16, but not as firebolt 21 or lightning ball 14. While this principle is based on a good principle, that is, to presume that casting spells tires the caster, I believe that simple cooldown does not accurately depicts exhaustion.

To more properly represent fatigue, it should be stats, not skills, which are on a cooldown. For example, we could decide that the Willpower stat is the base for short-term fatigue, with certain skills being able to increase that. For example, Gerad has an willpower of 14, and took an Arcane Lore sub-skill to increase his short-term magic pool by two. If he decides to cast a spell with an associated short-term cost of 6, he will have 10 more power points immediately available for casting more spells. Those 6 points he expended will start regenerating as soon as he's done casting, so if his regeneration isn't too low (Intelligence? Wisdom?), he will get a few more points available before the end of the fight.

To this you could add long-term fatigue, which few spells use, but regenerates slower, and perhaps some form of meditation, or cheap item buffs for regeneration (Hey, Cooking!). So with this system, you can keep lobbing fireballs as fast as you want, but you'll eventually be too exhausted to cast; it wouldn't hurt if you were ready to give those bad guys a good whack upside down the head, either. As long as you still have mana points, short- and long-term fatigue available, you'll be good enough to win another fight.

Top Ten Reason to Play This Game

Kill Ten Rats' forums have a thread asking people what the number one feature would be in a MMORPG (And of course, people don't limit themselves to one feature). So I thought I'd go ahead and tell the world what the top reasons for playing the thoughts of a roleplayer game would be.

1- Class-less, with a realistic skill system, allowing for a wide diversity of characters.
2- Customized crafting system, allowing players to decide exactly what they want to create.
3- A large, ever-changing world to explore or shape to your will.
4- Realistic everything, from combat and crafting to stealth and NPC creatures' lives.
5- Plenty of interesting non-combat activities, including trade skill games and other mini-games.
6- Grind-less combat advancement through the increased challenge and decreased number of opponents.
7- Non-static magic system, allowing for players to create their own spells from lists of acquired magical knowledge.
8- Advanced golem crafting, supplementing the already numerous ways of acquiring companions.
9- Complete guild system, allowing for a guild to have the advantage of both a small, friendly guild and a large corporation.
10- And finally, no monthly fee!
...
Ok, that last one might just be over-wishful thinking. Besides, monthly fees help keeping griefers away; you don't want griefers to create a hundred hotmail-backed accounts

Typical Adventuring

So, what would typical adventuring look like in a non-WoW MMORPG? When things are more logical, when there's not a dozen NPCs with giant golden exclamation marks over their heads, just begging for the thousandth player to come by and give him some murloc eyeballs. You might be lucky and find a local farmer - PC or NPC - who needs some wildlife taken away from his farm; you might have a teacher tell you to go elsewhere for education; or you or your guild might acquire enough of a notoriety that that local constables or interest groups come to you for safety assurance or component retrieval. Chances are, however, that unless you're ready to start from the bottom to acquire the trust of your fellow characterians, you'll have to make do with slaying evil without any shiny from the local monarch at the end.

For regular adventuring, there wouldn't be much to discuss. Players would track and take out targets as they see fit, be they food- and leather-bearing wildlife or evil invaders (Or maybe not-so-evil bystanders). Then someone comes across something noteworthy; perhaps a dragon has migrated in a cave nearby, or some evil creatures or cult has emerged and is getting prepared to wreak havoc on unsuspecting villagers and needs to be stopped. Either way, the adventurer has found something that he cannot do alone, and he will call upon friends and countrymen for help. Together, be they a handful or a hundred, they will discuss tactics and strategies, in hope of protecting that which is dear to them, because, in this game your actions count, and your inaction could cost lives - virtual ones, but lives nonetheless.

So they enter the stronghold, with the plan in mind, and contingencies accounted for; and when the plan inevitably dies, and contingencies are unprepared to deal with what lies ahead, they must improvise to the best of their abilities; because there is no telling what you will face, no help to know what your opponent has prepared but the means you have at your disposition, be they stealth, divination or whatnot.

And when the enemy lies defeated, allies resurrected and evil schemes thwarted, the loot can be distributed, the farewells be said and the portals home opened. Satisfied with having saved the world (Or perhaps their locality), the heroes can take care of business as usual.

Come to think of it, this sounds a lot more like a tabletop game then a typical MMORPG. Is it bad to dream of such thing?

Not WoW

Having recently tried Lord of the Rings Online, as well as reading reviews of it, I often heard people commenting, both positively and negatively, that the game is too much like World of Warcraft. On the one hand, some people like that fact that the interface and general gameplay are similar to that of World of Warcraft; on the other hand, people complain that the interface and gameplay are just rip-offs of World of Warcraft.

Now, as far as MMORPGs go, WoW has what people want; while it is certainly not the best MMORPG possible, it seems to have hit close to a local maximum (That is, the best you can get considering certain premises, like a class-based system). For a MMORPG to be very different from World of Warcraft, it would have to be very innovative in many ways, because, within the (albeit very large) niche of players who want class-based grindfests monster bashing, World of Warcraft has done very well, and there is little left to add. Games like the Lord of the Rings Online just have to change what they can and hope that the LotR theme will be sufficient to make the game profitable. Because, really, the only things LotRO can offer to fans of the genre is a story based around the sagas of the ring-bearer and a different world for those who have exhausted their WoW capacity.

It's not say that LotRO is bad; it's really well-done and polished, and I expect there will be very little need for patches after launch, which is certainly a very welcome change from what MMORPGs want people to get used to. You won't pay to beta-test LotRO (Unless you pre-order and get to play the pre-release game, but meh, you know to expect if you do that, and that is to actually get to keep your character after launch. Tobold said it best). But you won't need to learn how the game works if you've played WoW, which is a blessing and a curse.

Now, the point here is not to lament the lack of innovation in LotRO; Turbine thought that a class-based system would work best for Lord of the Rings Online, so they stuck to a WoW-like system of questing, monster-bashing and leveling. The real problem is that people will keep comparing LotRO to WoW, completely missing the fact that MMORPGs existed before WoW. MMORPGs have a rich and diverse history, and the fact that WoW was so popular simply means that they hit the demands of the market at the time with great accuracy.

What we need now, though, more than ever, is a game that can be defined not only as being not WoW, but as not being WoW (Take a moment to think about it). With LotRO, I think the market will hit the limits of how much of the same people can take, and the next big thing could very well be a game that shows more innovation than fans of the genre dared hope for. We don't need another UO, another EQ, SWG or DAoC; we need a game that can only be compared to itself. We've endured hack-and-slashes long enough to deserve that, right?

Flexible Voodoo Science

Three new skills added to the skills list : Voodoo, a new type of magic; Science, a theoretical skill, and Flexible Weapons, which isn't a new form of damage, but includes whips, flails and nunchakus.

Lord of the Rings Online

I tried the Lord of the Rings Online beta, but I'm not going to give you a review; you can get those at Tobold's, MMO Musing or maybe Kill Ten Rats. What I'll talk about, however, is an instance of the Mini games rule: the possibility to play real music in-game.

From what I could see, each class gets an instrument type they can play (Minstrels can learn all instrument types at level 20). From there, you just equip your harp, lute, flute or whatnot, and press number keys to play (Control for a flat, shift for an octave higher. Control + shift doesn't seem to work, however). You can impress everyone with your musical talents, or annoy everyone in the main square with your lack of; the only problem seems to be that music suffers from lag, and notes may get delayed different amounts, which leads to off-beat songs.

I think that concept is, to put it simply, awesome. Players can have fun with simple musical instruments, and perhaps entertain players in the main places for tips (Now if they could only find a way to make the lag between notes even, it would be perfect). And with a G15 keyboard, making songs would probably be quite simple. So yes, I think Turbine got it right with the /music.
I think if developers spent a little more time finding simple and fun things to entertain players, MMORPGs would have a longer time-to-boredom. We can only hope that they will find other such great ideas, and that their example will be widely followed.