Good versus Addictive

MMORPGs sell well usually because one of two things; either they're good, and people enjoy playing them, or they're addictive, and people can't bring themselves to stop playing them.

Most people who have played MMORPGs have some insight in the nature of addiction; it's what happens when you see something you don't overly enjoy, but you can't bring yourself to stop doing it. (Technically, an addiction is a "compulsion or overpowering urge to use a substance, regardless of potential or actual harm", but who's counting?) Addictive MMORPGs will offer you a fun and easy start, where everything is smaller than you and gives you great (relatively speaking) rewards. They'll hook you up to leveling, loot and quests so that you have a feeling of accomplishment when those happen, thus insuring that you will WANT to play the game. Then you're hooked.

Good games, however, will present you content that is thoroughly enjoyable all along, and let you decide how to spend your time - thus ensuring that you enjoy the parts you like most while minimizing the tedious ones. Good games don't need to bribe you with levels and big loot, they only need to present you with activities you might find enjoyable, and let you play them. Then you're hooked.

The big difference, in my opinion, stems from the fact that you are better off after a Good game - you've enjoyed yourself, and are happier. Addictive games, however, will try to present you with more goals to reach, with less regard to the actual enjoyability of reaching these goals.

Some of the upcoming games right now seem to have understood the distinction, and seek to give you an enjoyable experience with innovative design and non-repetitive events. They might not be the skill-boasting free-to-explore MMORPG of tomorrow's dreams, but they try their best to entertain the players, rather than hook them, and that is certainly worthy of mention.

Choices of Advancement

Now, I've talked about a pure PvP advancement, but that doesn't mean it's the only form of non-regular advancement. Players can be whatever they want in the game, including simple civilians.

Some would find buying resources and making items boring (even with the great minigames), but that's normal; different parts of the game appeal to different people. The important part is that one does not need to kill anything to progress in the game. They can be crafters, of course, or gatherers, but they can be much more.

For one, with an open market, they can be merchants or traders, buying low and selling high. Or they can be bookies, taking bets at the arena. They could provide various services, perhaps scouting new ore deposits for harvesters, or maybe taming exotic pets and selling them to city dwellers. And if all this is not enough, they can be politicians or activists, where they wouldn't need any skills for their characters, simply the support of the population, and be able to make a difference in the (virtual) world.

It doesn't matter what one likes to play, there is something for everyone; that is, after all, the point of a role-playing game.

Pure PvP Advancement

Sure, there's plenty to do on the PvP side, but would that be enough? Is it possible to play the entire game, as some kind of adventurer, fighting other players almost exclusively?

On the one side, starting players don't offer much to a confrontation. They would have to take odd jobs or join a mercenary group; which, hopefully, should be possible. Battlefields can be won with a heavier purse, should one side have no head for finances. Beyond that, however, when characters gain more power, reputation and allies, what options open for a pure PvP increase system?

The main concern with players fighting only other players, of course, is that the resources stay within the system. You might have gatherers mining, cutting and harvesting their fortune from the land itself and adventurers bringing home the loot from their latest conquests, but those who PvP have only their own skills to count towards income. They can form groups of mercenaries, fighting for the highest bidder and recruiting aforementioned newcomers, or they could join standing armies for a regular income, but can't slay evil and take their stuff, since player looting is just out of the question. A Pvper's income has to come from non-PvPers, even if it just means their harvester friends.

If demand for mercenaries is good, however, it's absolutely plausible that someone who doesn't like to fight NPCs could both make a living and have some fun playing the game simply by posting offers or checking the latest want ads; and since they will be fighting all day (and most of the night), their skills will increase by themselves. So yes, it's possible to gain power by fighting only other people, it just might require some more work than the regular adventuring would.

What about the PvP?

Some people like safe PvE, some people like arena-style PvP, and some people want unrestricted PvP. You can't please everyone, of course, but I realize I've talked very little about possible PvP rules. What could be done to try to please everyone would be to split the server into multiple parts, allowing different rule sets for each server. I, however, am not a real fan of multiple servers situations, so I will use my impressive intellect to find a better solution.

The first condition is that newcomers must be protected from killers, so as to not lose them to griefers. This can be accomplished by making protected zones for newcomers and a harsh legal system; you don't expect a pardon in real life because you killed two people less than the limit this week, and so people who kill others without justification will be counted as criminals and will be fair game for bounty hunters and guards (both player and Non-). Criminals would have to establish their own cities, hidden and protected from the rest of the world, just to be able to survive in the harsh world.

Another condition for a well-established PvP system is that people in need of non-non-player-character blood can find somewhere to soothe their anger. For that, duel, events (of, say, the jousting kind) and battlegrounds need to be established; and I'm not talking about fighting over and over and over and over again the the same, boring maps against (and with) random people to collect meaningless tokens. What I mean is that war has to be a very real thing, and people can go to war if their neighbors aren't trustworthy. Or they annoy them. Or they looked at them funny. Might want to be careful though, alliances are a hard thing to forge sometimes.

Finally, you can't have a decent PvP system without some reward for the winner, and penalty for the losers. In World of Warcraft, winners are rewarded a few shinnies more than the losers. You get paid for participating, and even that is optional, as you can be standing still the whole time and get the same rewards as your allies. That's not a decent PvP system, that's throwing some bones at people who request fillet mignon.

What they should get is a reason to kill people, a reason to group up against evil and a reason to run away in front of superior forces. Of course, corpse looting is out of the question, as it is too harsh a punishment when the cause of the death can be in no way the fault of the player. Experience penalties could exist, but in this case they would have to be per-skill, which means people with more skills get punished more; it also means that you would either have to lose some moves, or not have any penalty if you have no skill points left, so the whole thing is out of the question. You could have a monetary penalty, but banking, whether official or not (through the use of mules) would make losing money for death pretty pointless. And of course, permanent penalties, like stat loss, would drive players away faster than an exploiter on pre-patch day.

This leaves us with compulsory monetary penalties, a.k.a. item damage, and temporary debuffs. The former is pretty self-explanatory, and although small, does provide an important deterrent to risky actions. The latter, known as resurrection sickness, means that the player would be next to useless for a certain amount of time after death. Resurrection sickness could use a small overhaul, however, as a flat (dependent on level, usually) rate for death hardly seems like a fair deterrent.

First of all, the amount and time of the sickness should depend on the type of death the player suffered. If it is Death From Having Your Toes Bit Off By A Rat, then there's no penalty; you just get back up somewhere safe and go off killing more rodents. If it's Death By Player Killing, then check how Killed you were. Is it just a bad guy killing an unwary traveller? Then the player is found by local authorities and can resume normal activities within a few minutes. Or is it an army pillaging all in its path while mowing down all opposition? Then chances are you won't be of much help in the near future, otherwise you would just as soon go back into battle. The harder the death, the harsher the penalty should be.

But death penalty alone does not create a fair PvP system. To be fair, you also need to reward the winner. Of course, when you fight, you gain skill experience; there's no reason fighting another human being wouldn't teach you just as much as fighting NPCs would. The real problem is that, since corpse looting is a big no-no, and duplicating items to the winner is out of the question, then there's little incentive to fight. Rewards can be posted for killing enemies, but those would have to be either small, or come from the players' own collective pockets, otherwise they are too prone to abuse. The only way to reward players who help their team by showing up regularly in the battlefield is to give them fancy titles, which gives them benefits toward allied NPCs, as well as bragging rights (read : show how much they lack a social life).

Of course, all of this needs some serious balancing; no doubt important exploits would be exploited, loopholes looped and flaws taken advantages of, but with lots of hard work and hours spent telling your boss you're just testing the game, you'll eventually come with a good, stable system. That, or you'll just revert back to the lowest common denominator, and in the process scare away players who wanted something new.

On Altering Body Shape

Some games let you change some of your character's looks, like hair style and stance; some games have so few characteristics to change, changing anything isn't even worth considering. But what about more basic physical attributes? You can't go to the hair stylist to instantly change your fat into muscle, but why not a trainer?

Of course, you can't change everything instantly; it would require a large investment of money, a long wait period, and even maybe some player interaction, but in the end, you get your new body type. If your appearance isn't set by your stats, why not let the player change it over time?

The More, The Merrier

It's a well-known fact that adventuring parties generally want more people when they can; the guys playing Dungeon and Dragon will happily take another member in the party if that member can pull his weight. Yet in MMORPGs, half the times you can't take someone else, because the instance or encounter is limited to parties of a certain size which, logically, makes absolutely no sense. Why can't more than five people come in to fight Lars the Mean? And why are you limited to 25 people when raiding Melzebut? The short answer is because game limitations make having too many people at one place inconvenient. The real answer should be because everyone wants a go at the treasure.

When raiding the Lost Ark of Neephta, it's a good idea to have a strong party. Let's say that the dungeon or encounter has an Arbitrary Challenge Rating of 6, meaning players should add up to a Arbitrary Power Value of 6. Your warrior's a 2, mage is a 2. They find a beginner rogue for one more, and a beginner healer for a final 1, so they got a 6. They could try it with one less, which would result in a more challenging encounter, but with 1/6th more reward per party member; or they could try with one more, taking reduced treasure per person, but diminishing the risk greatly. This goes right along the idea that casual players should be able to help.

This also goes right along the risk-reward axis so well known to MMO players; you don't go fighting mobs your level when 'green' mobs only give a little less experience, so players don't bother with higher risk, they just take the safe reward; and in fighting without risk, you fight without glory. But at least the XP's good, right?

MMORPG : Scavenging from Other Games

Most MMORPGs nowadays are simple games, where you smash monsters around with a big stick, and perhaps get the chance to make a bigger stick for yourself (which invariably ends up being worse than anything you get from monsters). A MMORPG, based on its virtue of being a virtual world, should be able to do more than that. Why not incorporate elements from other game genres that would fit well within an MMORPG?

The Thief games, arguably the fathers of stealth games as we know them today, incorporated lots of scenes where the player was expected to avoid enemies rather than engage them - even when killing said enemies would be easy, doing so could alarm more guards to your presence, compromising your mission. In Thief, the player had to jump from shadow to shadow, avoid loud floors, knock down guards and extinguishes fires to avoid detection, the performance of which represented most of the game's gameplay. In MMORPGs, the concept of stealth is usually limited to a character basically turning invisible until someone of a high enough level gets close enough, and there is no consideration of lighting, nor do you care much about loudness. Stealth does not require any skill from the player.

In the Prince of Persia series, the player is challenged with complex acrobatics maneuvers, both during the platforming times and during combat. The player will successively walk on walls, enemies and columns, demonstrating the prince's incredible agility. Some will be quick to point that acrobatic-enabled sections of the game were hard-coded, meaning that it wasn't possible to walk on any random wall, but still, the idea of using short steps on the side of a wall to increase one's jumping distance is certainly something that is worthy of being considered for an MMORPG.

In the Civilization (rather long) series of games, the player must build cities to collect resources and make their empire grow. Yet, in MMORPGs, whenever the cities aren't fixed at game creation, the best thing players can do is place their house close to where they want to be. There is no resource consideration, and finding a source of drinkable water is never really a consideration. But what if that was actually important? Player might need to go scouting for locations before building up, considering natural resources, trace routes and potential threats. Successful cities would bring hundreds or thousands of players, challenging in popularity the NPC-operated cities.

In Flight Simulator... Yeah, OK, you see where I'm going with this one. Those so-called flying mounts would certainly take a whole new significance if you had to watch for wind direction and potential obstacles.

I'm not going to touch the economic simulations games, but suffice to say that there is a world of difference between a true open economy and a free-for-all auction house.

This is already a nice list of genres to borrow from, and I haven't even touched city simulators, sports, racing, puzzle or card games. MMORPGs can be much more than simple monster mashers, and if more MMORPGs trying to incorporate new ideas become successful, we might see a true revolution of the genre. MMORPGs of the future might have nothing to do with their simpleton ancestors.

How Unfair is Unfair?

There's lots of discussion possible about the subject of fairness in MMORPGs. Some say that since life isn't fair, then neither should a MMORPG depicting life in some form; others will simply refuse to play a game where success is a result of random or arbitrary events that aren't fair to the player's skills or commitment. Of course, everyone will agree that giving a Sword of Doom to a starting character is unfair, but exactly where does a line need to be drawn between keeping the game simple and fun and making it fair for everyone?

Basically, if a monster has one chance in ten to use an ability to instant kills the character, it's unfair. If Warriors can deal ten times the damage mages can, while retaining the best defenses, it's unfair. If Joey gets a red lollipop while I get a blue one, it's unfair. But here's the problem, if you give Karl a red lollipop too, then Joey will complain that he got a smaller piece of the cake last time, and he deserves a redder lollipop for that. Everyone knows it in the MMORPG industry, and they'll repeat it : you can't please everyone. As a corollary, I would like to submit the more people you try to please, the less will be satisfied with the results; those who get the nerfbat feel threatened, and those who were already balanced will feel forgotten.

So, how much unfairness do you need before things get unfair? It depends on who you ask, but I would say, not very much. Older gamers will remember the old days of the original Warcraft and Command and Conquer games, where fairness was mostly attained by making every side basically the same. Games like Warlords Battlecry tried to break the mold, and had various sides, each with their own powers and abilities, and most of them had exploits allowing you to gain quite unfair advantages; those that didn't were considered too weak to play in most cases.

These days, the easiest way to get good balance is to do your best, and then ask the fans to break the game during beta. And break they will, since number crunching, exploit-finding MMORPG players are a dime a dozen during betas; so much so that by the time the game ships, players will already know the shortest route to any point, whether it be some place or some power.

Of course, this doesn't answer the question of how much unfairness you need until things become actually unfair; I don't think anyone could answer that question correctly. It's all a matter of what type of game the player wants to play. In the end, just make sure that the fairness follows the game's philosophy, and it will likely attract people who want to play it.

Randomness in MMORPGs

Once again, Tobold initiates some brainstorming, with his much-touted concept of random cards in an MMORPG; the basic concept is that the actions a player can take at any time aren't fixed, but taken randomly from a pool of all possible actions, similar to Magic: The Gathering or other trading card games.

Now, I'm not completely against randomness in gaming, because always hitting for the same damage gets boring fast, and most people will like some randomness, but the concept of random abilities has quite an important limiting factor. Random abilities mean that even a well-built character can get a bad streak of events, and end up dead through no fault of their own; that's not what a fair MMORPG should do.

It's not to say that such a good concept can't happen, though; you just have to put it into perspective. Random powers beyond with inherently random elements; say, Chaos Magic. A caster of Chaos Magic has a much wider and powerful array of spell at their disposal, but they never know what powers will be available next; kind of like the trading card game example. You can add certain elements, like chances of random events upon casting a spell, but that's outside the scope of this post.

The important part is, random powers could be available, but they shouldn't be forced into the player. Some people like to play the slot machines; others want their own skills to matter in the game.

How Realistic is Too Realistic?

You should know by now that I advocate an MMORPG where realism is given an important part; not to say that magic or science fiction are bad, on the contrary, but it would be nice if they weren't just mysterious elements tossed in to add a few more classes. When you ask for realism, however, it's a good idea to precise when you want to stop.

Take food, for example. It seems it has become the norm in MMORPGs that food is to restore lost hit points, and perhaps give some small buffs. I don't know about you, but I rarely grow back lost limbs with a sandwich, and the only thing that gets better when I eat is my stomach (But hey, if your game has morale, more power to you!). So in a realistic game, regular, every day food shouldn't restore hit points.

How far do you push realism, however? You want there to be food in your game, because real people eat, but how important is food? In Ultima Online, not eating gave you penalties to your actions, but couldn't kill you directly. But you could make starvation kill, or at least make you take damage; just as you could have players require water, which they have to drink manually every hours to avoid dehydration. You could do these things, but they would just be tedious, especially for newbies, who might end up dying every few hours because they don't know how to get food or water. You want realism, but you also want fun.

Just as magically healing food is unrealistic, so is being able to run all the time; yet I don't see, nor do I want, an MMORPG where running gets you actually tired, because realistic walking speed is boring; walking is for stealthers.

What about sleep? You can't stay up a week playing the game, and neither should your characters be able to stay up for days with their plate mail on, bashing goblins. The sensible thing to do is to give penalties to players who stay up too long (Blizzard tried that, and they got angry explosive letters; so they changed the tiredness penalty to a well-rested bonus, and the fanboys shut up); staying up for days will result in your characters gaining next to no experience, and having heavy penalties on actions. The problem arises when the game world has different time sets than the real world; if your days last only a few hours, then you cannot expect a player to stay up more than a few hours at a time, which will discourage many, and not just the hardcore players. Many players enjoy playing for hours on week-ends without having to worry that their character is tiring. Magic and alts can allow you to game longer, but eventually you'll have to get some rest yourself.

So in short, getting a good balance of realism is hard; you have to decide where to draw the line, and make sure it's before the fun ends. In the end, you just have to make sure you alienate as few people with your decisions.

Elemental Damage

It's one of my pet peeves, something that always irks me when playing fantasy video games; that casting a big rock at the enemy deals earth damage. Or piercing the enemy with an icicle is ice damage. Or that you put some fire on your sword and suddenly it starts healing the fire elemental.

You don't see it that much in MMORPGs, but it's still there. There is no such thing as earth damage. That big rock deals blunt damage. And that icicle? Yeah, it's cold and all, but the cold won't kill the opponent; the piercing will.

Please, developers, stop thinking in numbers once in a while, and see the logic behind reasonable damage types.

That is all.

Create Your Own Dungeon

Yet again, Tobold steals the scoop on an idea that's been in my head for a while now : that of player-created dungeons. But unlike sir Tobold's idea, my player-created dungeons are less about players setting spawn points and more about what happens when mines get too deep.

Dungeons in The Dream MMORPG aren't little instance doors that sparkle or flash in the world, which you can cross to get somewhere where level-appropriate monsters get killed; dungeons are what happens when people don't or can't use their caves or structures anymore.

Just imagine; Little Town #42 needs iron, starts mining iron. When they don't need iron from the mine anymore, either because they've secured a better supply, or their need has diminished, they abandon the mine; it's only a matter of time until some baddies take it as a lair, no?

Or how about this... Littletownians start mining the iron, and soon discover a precious mithril deposit. If the word gets out that there is mithril in Little Town's mine, they might get in trouble; they will need to hire guards to protect the precious metal, or risk some evil overlord taking over the mine for his own needs; then they would have an overlord with mithril to fight, which is significantly harder.

So yeah, player-created dungeons aren't really create, they just happen. Think carefully next time you start a mine, it might get taken over someday.