mmorchive

April 28, 2003 fohguild.org

Kreugen:

I haven’t gone through all of the replies yet, but I want to clear something up. You do not and should not hold yourself to the specific numbers I provided, especially with the challenge/raid zones.

Say you want a zone that players can only attempt/defeat once a week, much like EQ now. Maybe the zone is nothing more than one encounter and the zone itself only stays up for six hours from the time its created. Point is, the amount of time the zone stays up does not have to correspond to the respawn time - if you want a zone done once a week, the zone does not have to stay up for an entire week taking up cpu. In fact, once certain conditions have been met - say, all of the ‘named’ have been killed - these zones should expire after a few hours no matter how much time was remaining. In any case, the players cannot return until you want them to. This way you can control the flow of loot and so forth.

Again, the point is the players are not fighting one another over content.

I intend to occasionaly write a series of articles on what I feel needs to be done to make a successful MMO in the future, and how to improve upon the existing model. These articles are based on things that I have thought about but never actually written out before, so the topics will be somewhat random. For the most part they are about fixing the basic problems of Everquest, or any MMO that takes its roots heavily from MUDs.

For private comments, please email me at kreugen@fohguild.org

I’m going to start this with a question: What is the best time you had in everquest? For many, the answer often falls into two categories: 1) exploring/defeating content for the first time 2) fighting through a fully spawned dungeon/uber zone with no other groups around to get in the way. Conversely, the worst experiences in everquest tend to mirror the best: 1) doing the same content for the hundreth time and gaining nothing from it 2) going to a dungeon and finding it so crowded that one could walk from the beginning to end and back again in complete safety, or having to wait for hours, days or even weeks for your turn at a named mob or boss, because its always dead or being attempted by another group/guild. In the most general sense, the best part of MMO’s is the other people.. and the WORST part of MMO’s is the other people. After all, outside of ones own group/guild, for the most part those other players represent competition over limited content. At the guild level this translates to absolute hatred of one another, because another guild represents a threat to your own license to have fun. Want to enjoy sebilis? Too bad, overcamped. Want to give a dragon a shot? Good luck finding it alive. The only possible way to enjoy the best everquest has to offer is to be on the front lines - getting to new content before others, being the first to explore and the first to come up with new strategies. As a result, you wind up with only a small minority who is getting the most out of the game.

There is a second problem as well - Everquest and all of its wanna-be’s do not have a way to limit the numbers players throw at their encounters, making design a real crap shoot. My favorite metaphor for this is to compare MMO’s to single player computer RPG’s. In these games if you run into a dungeon or boss that you can’t get past, you can simply go somewhere else and gain more power until its either no longer challenging at all or just barely doable. This is generally true in all of these games and is quite hard to avoid short of total linearity; however where they differ is how they treat the endgame. In some, the endgame is meant to be a challenge for a fully leveled, fully decked out balanced party and damn near impossible for anything below that. For the most part every AD&D based game is like this. Throne of Bhaal how I love thee. In others - terrific examples being the final fantasy or might and magic games, and especially morrowind - its possible to gain so much power that you can wipe out the final bosses in a single round. For some players the tedious process of leveling up to 99 so they can kill Chaos with a singe punch from their blackbelt is their idea of fun. The same exists in MMO’s - you can tackle an encounter with a gathering of people you know fairly well and the bare minimum of power, or you can form a legion of 150 faceless drones and overwhelm it.

It is possible to solve both. Its not a new idea, but its certainly one that has yet to be done well where it has been done at all. Its the idea of Virtual spaces, whereby multiple copies of a zone can be generated - the SAVIOR of MMO’s for the first game clever enough to implement it.

Now, you still have your virtual world - cities and overland maps work the same as they have in Everquest and all the other MMO’s. But when a player enters what I’ll call an Adventure Zone, they’ll be presented with a number of options.

- Create a new zone
- Crate a open-entry zone (anyone can enter up to a maximum # determined by the player, up to a number designed by the designer)
- Create an inviite only zone (anyone attempting to enter has to be approved by the current zone owner)
- Create a closed zone (only people specifically invited by the zone owner can enter or even see the zone)

The current zone owner can change the paramaters as he wishes - ie he can close an open zone, and so forth.

- Join a zone (if a zone is invite only, it will pop up a request box on the zone owners screen)
This will display the current active zones and the players inside, if they are not anonymous

Now in the case of an adventure zone, once you create or enter a zone and then leave, that zone is yours for the next hour. That is, if you exit the zone and reenter, you will not be given a choice - you can only reenter the same zone until you have been out of it for at least an hour or some other arbitrary amount of time (basically, this time should be at least as long as the maximum respawn time of the zone). This way you cannot simply enter a zone, clear the mobs you want, then go join another. Similarly, these virtual zones remain in existance until they have been empty of all players for an hour (or again, whatever amount of time is set by the designer, but it should remain consistant)

This solves so many problems that I have absolutely fallen in love with the idea. Yes, items will enter the word faster, but only because players will not have to wait in lines for hours upon hours for camps to be freed. When players say they hate camping, they don’t mean they hate the process of killing mobs in the hopes of getting loot. They just hate the fact that OTHER people are always camping the item they want. This completely eliminates that issue. Still, at the very least items will have to be level limited to curb inflation. As far as server load, well, keep in mind that many zones will not exist at all, as nobody is in them yet!

There is of course a second kind of zone, what I will call the Challenge Zone. Here is the meat of your game - these will obviously be the high risk vs reward areas. The primary differnece here will be 1) the timeout on these zones is much longer, say 3 days or more. 2) they automatically expire after this period, regardless of whether or not they hold players 3) they are always invite-only 4) there are stricter requirements for entry - level limits (both min and max), minimum # of players, and most importantly - maximum # of players. Finally, a designer can make encounters for a specific range of player power and know that they are held to it. Want to challenge sub level 30’s and give them non-tradeable loot that they otherwise cannot obtain so early? Simple. Want to make a zone that challenges an endgame group of six players, a la the plane of justice trials? No problem, set a hard limit of six. And no more waiting in line for hours either. How about a zone full of dragons? Well, you don’t want one goofball spawning a 3 day zone just to take some screenshots of the zone in. So you set a minimum raid size and average level requirements. Maybe you need to complete a quest, or defeat certain other zones before you can create or enter the zone. Point is, you have total control over your zones and you can now accomdate as many players as your servers can handle. No more wondering what will happen if 200 people band together and blow through what you worked so hard to create and tune. These are called challenge zones because they WILL challenge the player. Every player will have an equal chance to experience these zones. No more rushing online the second servers come up. No more spawn calenders or forced rotations. No longer will GM’s be tied up for hours out of the day settling disputes. No more waltzing through near empty zones on the coattails of others. This represents and absolute utopia for anyone who has played everquest at its higher levels.

Problems: For all good things there is a price. For the players on bleeding edge, not much at all will change - they already had zones much to themselves anyway. But the second and third waves won’t neccesarily be six months behind anymore. You could actually have servers where there are two or three Fires of Heaven’s, all of them defeating content at much the same pace. You can see this as bad or great, but as a result, more people will run out of content at the same pace generally reserved for only the resident kings of the server. Of course, this is assuming your “challenge zones” don’t quite live up to the name! These things can be tweaked, and again, players can not simply add more numbers to compensate.

But, I have another idea that will ensure that players have compelling reasons to not skip content - even at the low and mid levels. Woulden’t it be great if people actually visited EVERY zone within their level range before moving on?

The fundamental of any game is to entertain and reward. RPG’s reward players with items, experience, and access to further content; they entertain through story, exploration, and the process of gaining such rewards (winning battles, completing quests, etc) In every MMO so far, those rewards have been limited to money, experience, item and further progress in the game. In the end game, those rewards are whittled down to just items - there’s nothing left to explore, nowhere to progress, and nothing left to do but play virtual dress up with ones avatar.

What if rewards weren’t just limited to items? And what if meeting certain goals rewarded more than just the one or two people lucky enough to gain a neat items, but rather rewarded in some way everyone?

What if the first time a player killed the ghoul lord, he gained a bonus to his base/maximum armor class? (scaled per class.. a warrior and a wizard should not both gain 50 ac, for example) What if offing nagafen granted a one time +20 base fire resistance, or a stat bonus? Furthermore, bonuses can be larger for “first time” events and then non existant or diminished for every kill therafter. IE, killing a moss snake for the first time or the first several times grants extra experience. Suddenly you have reasons to actually visit every area for reasons other than the loot they provide. In everquest, the choices at any given level range tends to become a) best loot or b) best experience. There should at least be a reason to do EVERYTHING once beyond just exploration. A skill point based system could provide a number of skill points for first-timers, and then a small amount for every kill therafter of challenge zone level boss mobs.

In Everquest’s system as it is today, picture gaining 10 AA points for your first kill of an elemental god, and a point or two for every kill therafter. No longer do you have to endure zero gain in clearing after clearing to “pay off” the one piece of loot you gain from the encounter. Theres ALWAYS some small gain for everyone involved.

A reward can be anything - skill points, base/max stat bonuses, various focus-like innate spell bonuses, whatever. It could and should be possible to advance ones character soley through defeating various forms of challenge zones, rather than setting up camp and grinding experience. The easier path will take longer, and actually weaken the character over time, but that’s the point of having such challenge zones, isn’t it?

The way I would break it down is this: For adventure zones, only first-time bonuse would apply. In challenge zones, you would have very large first-time bonuse, and some diminished bonus therafter. But in all cases, it would be to a players benefit to visit every area that he can before that area becomes trivial. “green” mobs do not grant this bonus - in fact, challenge zones cannot even be entered beyond a certain level, as already stated.

Quest of course can work much the same way: One-time, or repeatable with diminished reward. Again it should be benefitial to do as many quests as possible for a given level range.

Problems: Same reason why everyone claims they can’t do it like this, the size of the character file. I say, get more creative programmers.

Kyena:

You have some great ideas there, I think there are a couple other problems though. The primary reason that EQ has stayed as popular as it has, for as long as it has boils down to the combination of two factors:

1) People love competing with other people.

2) EQ has done an outstanding job of releasing new content in a timely matter related to player progression.

When I say competing with others, I do not mean PVP, that side of EQ is a very small percentage of the player base. The other type of competition is basically character/guild progression. Whether it is the “my guild killed mob_01 before your guild” or “my character got item/skill/level before yours did”. EQ does a great job of creating indirect player competition. Whether it be because of the race to a mob upon server up, or getting the camp for a rare item, if you offered the possiblity of all characters leveling/gearing up at the same theoretical rate, this eliminates alot of this side of the competition aspect of EQ. No one is proud of an item unless it is rare or hard to achieve, the more people that have it, the less of a sense of accomplishment your average person has.

Secondly, Verant/SOE has done an absolutely superb job of releasing new content in a timely matter, as of the last few expansions. Most other MMORPGs rely on PVP combat to keep them “fresh” after the actual game content runs dry for players, which is usually a very short period of time, less than a month normally. The Original EQ release got fairly stale before Kunarks release, and Kunark became fairly stale before the release of Veliuos, but ever since then, there has been very little time between the ultimate achievement of one expansion, and the release of the next. I mean, how long were people farming AoW and Vulak before Luclin released? How long where people farming Vex Thal before PoP released? Some servers may have spent a short period of time waiting for new content, but many servers never had that wait at all, they were not done with the previous expansion when the new one hit. This will be the main, very very difficult problem of a MMORPG based on Kreugens ideas. It would be near impossible for a company to release new content to keep players busy, and not bored to the point of cancelling their accounts, if there were not bottlenecks of some sort. As shitty as they may be, farming keys, waiting on rotations to kill mobs, or whatever the holdup may be, is a necessary evil. No company could afford the cost of releasing a major expansion every couple of months, nor would those expansions generally be of above average quality I would imagine. The subscription fee would have to be enormous to even attempt such an undertaking.

To wrap up, I say all of this not to make an attempt to shoot down Kreugens ideas, I think they are outstanding. I just wanted to offer up some problems that occured to me, so that hopefully somebody can come up with some great ideas to solve them, and hopefully the blueprint for the ultimate MMORPG

Fendryl:

Welcome to the world of those that ‘get-it’ , Kreguan. Now that you’ve had your epiphany, the frustrations with EQ will even grow more now. You’ll actually be amazed to see how many other problems in EQ find their roots in this issue. Everything from time zone complaints to even class balance gripes, you’ll slowly realize, relate back to the issue of competition for content.

One part that you didn’t really address, is alot of people do enjoy the racing & competition for the content. It’s a valid playstyle, and in a pure virtual space system, those players do lose out. What has been suggested to support those players is to still have the shared spaces that EQ has, but to supplement them with the virtual spaces. That way those that want to race, still can; those that don’t care to, however can still spawn their private instance & go on their merry way.

Another issue, slightly related above, is the virtual penis factor. A number of people want to measure thier cyber manhood against eachother. Currently this comes down to “I wake up earlier than you, neener neener.” However, given a virtual space, opportunity is no longer hindered; so now you’re free to systematiclly track all sorts of data points, and publish them on the web. Guild X’s best kill of RZ only had 27 people but had 3 deaths, Guild Y killed him with 50 people, and no deaths, Guild Z can clear all of Ssra in 20 mins with only 14 people.

Virtual spaces isn’t anything terribly new, as many will point out, AO was one of the first MMPOG to bring it to the masses, unfortunately the blandness of generated dungeons, coupled with the the myriad of other problems in AO pretty much obscured the benefits that were there. Just about every game in the works plans to address this as well, WoW, Mythica, Guild Wars, City of Heroes, EQ2, and a number of others all ‘get-it’ now.