A recent post by Tobold on virtual property rights was interesting to me because it’s a very common player perception. His argument, roughly, is that it would be great if the courts could rule on virtual property, so we know whether we “own” what our characters own, or if game companies do. If a character is worth $10,000, should we be allowed to sell it regardless of what the game companies want? The courts should rule on this.

Well, actually, that’s a terrible idea — given the level of knowledge the courts have, they couldn’t possibly make an informed and nuanced decision. Hell, we as an industry can’t do it because the rules are changing all the time, and forming a meaningful question is impossible.

But the interesting thing to me is that this argument exists only because of how successful MMOs have been at veiling their true nature. By tying into concepts players are already familiar with, they hide the game.

“Virtual property is property. It’s my stuff. Shouldn’t I be allowed to keep it regardless of what the game company wants? Virtual land is land, so somebody owns it — and if I paid for it with virtual currency, why should the game company be able to take it away?” These are the questions of someone who has bought hook, line, and sinker into the fiction of the virtual world.

Game companies reject these questions at a more base level than these players can even see! From a game company point of view, it’s like a FPS player demanding that they should be able to keep the shotgun from the map they just played, because they “own” it and the game company shouldn’t be able to take it away. It’s so illogical to game companies that it doesn’t mean anything at all: players are effectively talking nonsense.

Suppose that the company had instead chosen to make an epic single-player RPG. But the storyline has a tragic twist (not unlike the one in Ultima 6 or Final Fantasy 7): about 100 hours into the game, one of your most powerful characters dies. Did the company take away something you owned? Can you sue? Most gamers instinctively know the answer is “no” — they no more own the character’s possessions than they own their favorite character on Lost. They are playing through a story told by the game developers. If Mr. Eko dies, you might feel sad, but you didn’t suffer material loss.

But what if you were about to sell your copy of the game, along with your save file? You could have sold it for $100 yesterday on eBay, but now that you’ve overwritten your save game, you lost your most powerful character and your account is now only worth $70. Does the company owe you $30? Again, most people understand that the answer is “no”: even though you found a sucker who would have paid you $30 more for your old save games, that value was tangential on something you didn’t actually control. (Leaving aside your idiocy for overwriting your saved game; or perhaps the game only has one save slot, like Nethack.)

What if the answer was “yes”? Well, then games could never have bad things happen. If the value of your saved game can only go up as you play it, then there can be no losing. This would destroy games as we know them.

From a game company’s point of view, you don’t own your character any more than you own Aeris in Final Fantasy 7. You license a copy of the game in order to enjoy it, but you don’t own what happens in the story.

The neat thing is that players think they do own their characters. The sense of identity is so strong, and the open-endedness of MMO games is so broad, that they perceive things differently. They aren’t in a story, they are in a virtual world where they (the player, not the character) should have rights not unlike those in the real world. Nevermind that those rights would have devastating effects on all of gaming. It just feels like players are being abused unfairly. This is a case of MMO companies being too successful for their own good. If only games weren’t so open-ended, if only the character wasn’t so customizable and nameable, then they wouldn’t have this problem. The very illusion of open-endedness is what creates the belief of ownership.

In fact, the very open-endedness causes some people to feel that it needs a new categorization. “It’s not a game,” some argue — “It’s a virtual world, and should have different laws to protect it!” That argument is hard to defend because nobody can agree on when a game becomes a world. Final Fantasy 12 was a single-player virtual world, and had very similar mechanics to an MMO. It was just offline. Or would you argue that a virtual world can only happen when a LAN cable is connected to your box? What makes MMOs more of a virtual world than FPSes? Is it the persistence of your character? Okay, fine, let’s make an MMO that resets every three months. Is it still a virtual world? How about an MMO that resets every week? When does it stop being a world? These and other questions are very hard to answer because we don’t have enough concepts and definitions to even pose particularly meaningful questions, let alone get answers to them.

The very worst thing that could happen would be for a judge to step in and try to rule on virtual property, because they’d have to define what that means. First off, they would have to distinguish virtual worlds from games somehow. Next, they would have to distinguish designer intent from game player intent. Finally, they would have to rule on how much control game developers have over their own game rules. Imagine Parker Brothers having this trouble with Monopoly and you can see why game companies fight this tooth and nail: they are unwilling to give up any aspect of creative control.

Are there questions a judge might usefully rule on? Sure, someday. For instance, at some point we might need a clearer picture of who owns the rights to player-created content. But questions about player-created content are a million miles away from questions about who owns your level 70 Troll Shaman with all epic gear. The game developers made every aspect of your character and allowed you to license it.

Maybe after twenty or thirty more years of game creation, the distinctions will be clearer, and we might see our way to asking more meaningful questions. Right now, there aren’t any questions that a judge could usefully answer.

It can be difficult to discuss MMO design in the complete abstract — there are just too many variables — so today I am going to deconstruct and analyze a specific design in an existing game. My target: Noblegarden, a small holiday event in World of Warcraft. First we will look at how the event is designed, then reverse engineer its probable goals and look at how it meets those goals. Finally, we’ll take a look at how some modifications to the event might improve it — or not!

Basic Design

Noblegarden is the in-game representation of Easter in the World of Warcraft. It lasts only one day and has only one activity: finding Brightly Colored Eggs!

• The event starts at 12:01am (server time) on Easter day and lasts exactly 24 hours.
• During the event, Brightly Colored Eggs spawn in the racial homelands (i.e. the newbie zones).
• These eggs are essentially tiny treasure chests. Players who open them receive a token amount of money and either candy or special holiday clothing.
• Each egg has a small chance of containing either a White Tuxedo Shirt (~1%) or Black Tuxedo Pants (~1%), both of which are identical in appearance to tuxedo clothing produced via the tailoring profession, or an Elegant Dress (~0.5%). The Elegant Dress can be obtained no other way; it is essentially a peach-colored version of the wedding dress.

Probable Goals

Of course we can’t really know what the designers’ goals were in creating this content, but we can make some pretty good guesses by examining what they implemented.

First off, Noblegarden was intended to be a fairly small, low-key event without a lot of hoopla. According to the WoW event calendar, Noblegarden is one of only two major events that last only a single day — and the other is New Year’s Eve, which is arguably part of the Feast of Winter Veil. In addition, there are no city decorations for Noblegarden, nor any town crier-style NPCs to let the players know what’s up. And this makes sense: a goodly number of WoW players will likely be spending Easter with family, not in-game. Although Blizzard wants to commemorate the holiday, they don’t want to make players who are spending time with family feel like they are missing out.

Secondly, Noblegarden is an event aimed squarely at new and low level characters. The Brightly Colored Eggs spawn in newbie (level 1-10) zones; the money inside is a token amount for a new character but literally only pennies (worthless, even) to a higher-level character; and the candy inside is equivalent to the lowest level food — again, worthless to anyone higher level.

Based on these factors, it seems likely that new players were intended to run across this content as they played through the low-level areas in a normal fashion. Noblegarden seems to have been planned as a low-key bonus for newer characters, an enjoyable but not especially involved reflection of a popular real-life holiday (albeit without the religious trappings).

Observed Behavior

Unfortunately, our plans as designers last only until they meet the players. In this case, the actual behavior of players during Noblegarden differs rather a lot from what we might hope for from the presumed goals.

• The holiday clothing — and most especially the Elegant Dress — is the real draw in this event. Even though it has no gameplay stats, its rarity ensures a high price on the Auction House — and that means that lots of players of all levels converge on the newbie areas to look for it, whether or not they want it themselves.
• The eggs are widely scattered. Based on my personal experiences and polling random players I ran across, it seems that a player with a mount in an area that is not too overpopulated can find about 20 eggs an hour. But the count goes way down when the area becomes heavily populated with egg-seekers. The more seekers in the area, the less happy — and less polite! — any of them will be.
• The eggs are really hard to find. They can only be identified visually — they can’t be selected with the keyboard and they don’t show up on the minimap. They are small, and although they are bright blue they don’t stand out terribly well against WoW’s over-saturated palette. And for some reason the eggs do not use WoW’s normal quest-item sparkles to draw your attention. To add insult to injury, many of them are also hidden behind bushes.
• Because of these factors, the event quickly devolves into a race for eggs. A low-level character will generally be at a disadvantage: they are unlikely to have any speed-increasing abilities, and they will also have to spend more time dealing with hostile creatures in the area. For higher level characters, it’s all about quick eyes and memorizing the locations where you’ve seen eggs before.

Some low level characters do indeed participate in this event in the manner that we imagined: they find a couple of eggs, enjoy their candy, and go on their merry way. But for many players, the lure of the dress is too strong. They spend hours running in circles desperate to find one more egg. The competition, the difficulty of finding eggs, and the low drop rate of interesting rewards all combine to frustrate many players, and the clear divide between “winning” (finding a dress) and “losing” (finding nothing but candy) makes it easy to feel that you have wasted hours of your life for absolutely no reward except a nasty eye-strain headache.

Since a dress shows up in only one of 200 eggs, the majority of people hunting dresses won’t find one even if they hunt eggs for eight solid hours — and will consequently feel like they “lost” at the event.

Modifications

So let’s pretend for a moment that we are able to make some modifications to the Noblegarden content in order to help it better suit our goals as we described them above. It’s clear that the event as it stands isn’t quite there, but what can we do?

Well, it’s the rare and unique Elegant Dress (and, to a lesser extent, the other holiday clothing) that’s causing all the trouble. So let’s remove the clothing! Without these rewards, there is no reason for higher level characters to flood into the newbie zones in search of eggs. And if they don’t go searching for eggs, they won’t get frustrated. Problem solved! Let’s go home!

Except …

First off, the content is already in the live game. Removing these rewards after the players have already seen them and come to desire them is a bad idea. Secondly … well, let’s face it. The clothing rewards are the only thing that give this event a little flair. While the goal of a laid-back, newbie-friendly event is a good one, a laid-back, newbie-friendly even that also has a little something for higher level characters is even better.

So if we don’t remove the clothing, maybe we lower the demand for it. We could provide an alternative method of getting a dress that looks just like this one, even if it’s named differently (as is already true for the tuxedo shirt and pants). We could just add a tailoring recipe for a similar dress. That will remove a lot of the impetus for grinding the eggs (unless we do something silly and make the new dress recipe too hard to get!). But it won’t remove the demand for all players since some of them will still insist on the original, and it won’t solve the frustration issues for the ones that remain. Plus, we risk taking the sparkle out of our Noblegarden event. We don’t want to spoil the feel of the event we’ve already built, we just want to make it less frustrating.

Of course, we could remove the clothing from the eggs, then add a Noblegarden vendor who sells recipes for making the clothing. This would allow the creation of the clothing all through the year, but still make it Noblegarden-special. The Festival clothing from the Lunar Festival works in a similar fashion. But that leaves the whole looking-for-eggs thing somewhat pointless, and since that’s the holiday activity we’re riffing on that’s not quite ideal.

Okay. So let’s make the clothing rewards less rare. We’ll up the drop rate! Before we do this, though, let’s have a sanity check with other team members to make sure that a more common dress fits our goals — and not just our goals, but the goals of the overall game. For some reason, rarity is one of those factors that can make the most congenial team want to kill each other. What seems stupidly rare to me seems stupidly common to you, and sometimes there’s just no explaining why. The best we can do is try to place the item and its rarity within the context of the broader game.

And once we’ve done that, we’ll need to consider questions like these: Should we let you stock up on dresses? That’s not really an issue now, but it might be if we adjust the rarity. What will happen if we let you stock up? Presumably you sell them in the fall for a profit. Is that bad? To counter stockpiling, we could make the clothing bind on pickup (although that would affect existing items, which is somewhat rude). Or we could make them unique so you can only carry one of each type. Or we can make finding the clothing pieces contingent on a quest, so that you only ever find one. Would that be one ever, or one per year? One ever didn’t work out so well with the Lunar Festival, so probably one per year. But maybe we should just let you stockpile the damned dresses — unless that encourages people to stick around using up all the eggs and being all competitive.

And you know, none of things things fixes the basic underlying issue with the eggs themselves: that they are too scattered and too hard to see.

So we keep tweaking and thinking and trying to predict player behavior. The actual results in this theoretical case aren’t nearly as important as the process of analyzing the situation and thinking through the potential modifications. In the end, my own suggested changes would be something like this:

• More, more, more eggs! Triple the spawn rate of the eggs. The main goal here is to lower competition, although the changes to the rewards will help with that also.
• In addition to money and candy, add an Egg Fragment to the loot contained in each egg. Also remove the chance to drop clothing. You’ll be obtaining that in other ways.
• Make the eggs easier to spot. Two actions could help here: First, the eggs can use the normal quest-item sparkle to draw players’ attention. Second, allow players to buy a buff from the Noblegarden vendor (see below) that let’s them track eggs on their minimap for 30 minutes.
• Stick a Noblegarden vendor in each newbie zone town. In addition to the egg-tracking buff, this vendor would also trade a certain number of Egg Fragments for the White Tuxedo Shirt (20 fragments), the Black Tuxedo Pants (20 fragments), and the Elegant Dress (60 fragments).
• Finally, the Noblegarden vendor also trades Egg Fragments for the recipes to make the clothing: Recipe: White Tuxedo Shirt (60 fragments), the Black Tuxedo Pants (60 fragments), and the Elegant Dress (180 fragments).

Goals: Reduce competition and frustration of finding eggs. Increase utility of finding any one egg. Increase distribution of rewards to all players.
Total new content: 1 generic NPC, 1 quest item, 1 buff, 3 recipes.

I want to emphasize, though, that my suggestions here are really just self-indulgent navel-gazing. Without knowing the actual goals of the content, I’m just guessing. But it’s still fun (and educational) to go through the process!

Conclusion

This little deconstruction exercise shows how we can analyze and modify existing content: determine the goals, observe actual behavior, and then brainstorm methods to make the behavior better fit the goals (or else change the goals!).

I hope that it also shows some of the many skeins of thought that go into MMO design. The point is not Noblegarden, of course — the point is to think about the factors that go into the design of good content — and the number one factor is always going to be the players.

Of course, if I was really a Blizzard designer I would have a couple of follow-up tasks here:

1. Make sure that the goals of the Noblegarden event were clearly documented so that future live team members could more easily evaluate the content’s performance. (This is especially important if the goals have changed. Otherwise it becomes a matter of tribal lore and team politics, both of which are notoriously unreliable.)
2. Document the reasoning behind any modifications I decided to make as well as any modifications I decided not to make, so that future team members can more easily avoid mistakes that seem obvious now but may not in a few years. (They will have to deal with the mistakes that I end up making (because they don’t seem obvious now) on their own.)

It’s perhaps a bit surprising, but MMOs are dense. It can be hard to find information in context: sure, you can easily find recipes for all the crafted items in a game, but how useful or common or popular are those items? That’s not something you can find out as easily.

Because of this, many designers are unaware of what’s happened in past games. The typical MMO developer I’ve met has only played two or three MMOs for any lengthy period of time. So when they sit down to create, say, the potion system for their next MMO, they can’t draw on the designs of what came before them. I don’t have a general solution for this (except to play as many MMOs as you can), but as an experiment, let’s try to add a bit of context about this one very narrow gameplay element: potions.

Potions aren’t always bottles of juice that you drink – they can also be magic scrolls or gems, or even theoretical concepts in the case of City of Heroes. The distinguishing feature of potions is that they are one-use items designed to aid or assist you in combat. Their effects are typically restorative or buffing in nature.

In order to keep it focused, I’ll ignore other consumables such as food, which have subtly different game semantics. It’s admittedly a pretty vague distinction, but I’ll do my best.

The following data is what I’ve been able to scrounge up through contacts or personal memory — there are probably plenty of mistakes and omissions. If so, please point them out and I’ll get it as accurate as possible. And feel free to provide a potion overview for other games!

UO: Potions for every occasion

In UO, alchemists could craft potions from collected raw ingredients. Certain potions, such as Night Sight, were fairly essential if you wanted to be able to see anything at night (without hacking your client). Poison-curing potions were critical for survival, as otherwise poison would quickly prove fatal. Most other types of potions were of modest value, although healing potions could be used in PvP to great effect.

Although there isn’t a notion of stacking potions in UO, players could craft Potion Kegs to store up to 100 uses of a single type of potion.

Everquest: Wussy Potions

I can’t find anybody who played EQ1 at very high levels to tell me how potions worked there. At mid-level, potions were impossibly expensive, and did very little. They could be handy for PvP battles, but even there they weren’t really worth the trouble. The lack of information on the web about EQ potions suggests to me that they weren’t particularly valuable even at high levels.

Asheron’s Call: Tools of the Killing Trade

In Asheron’s Call, there were three main types of potions, corresponding to healing, stamina restoration, and mana restoration — the three “bars” of energy that are used up in combat. Stamina potions were absolutely critical for melee classes; and it was not atypical to carry a few hundred with you into combat. (They stacked to a high number.) Each swing of a weapon drained stamina, and fights often ran fairly long, so that it was not atypical to drink several stamina potions during a single encounter. Thus, potions acted as a money-sink for most character types.

Mages typically carried stamina potions also. Though spellcasting doesn’t drain mana, mages could convert stamina into mana, and then replenish their stamina with potions. This was much more cost-effective than directly restoring their mana with expensive mana potions.

Health potions could be consumed in combat, and their repeated use often turned PvP encounters into extremely lengthy affairs.

Potions only provided restoration, but “magic gems” provided potent one-use buffs. These gems were mostly found in loot, though later they could also be purchased from NPC vendors. Thanks to their lengthy durations and noticeable effects, these were very valuable for certain types of twinking and power-leveling.

Dark Age of Camelot: ???

DAoC added potion creation after the game shipped, and I couldn’t find somebody with first-hand knowledge. If anybody can fill in the details, I’d appreciate it.

Clearly there are a vast number of potions and tinctures that can be crafted, but their importance, usefulness, and commonness are unknown.

Asheron’s Call 2: Mystery Juice

Potions in Asheron’s Call 2 could not be crafted, only found as loot. Like most other loot, potions were randomly generated, so the exact effect and potency of a potion varied very widely. Some potions had exceedingly potent effects, while others were almost useless. Because each potion was unique, potions could not be stacked in inventory. Players tended to keep only the most potent potions on hand in order to free up pack space.

Players could drink potions in combat, but a character that drank a potion performed a rather lengthy animation during which they could do nothing else. Drinking potions in combat was still sometimes worthwhile, but was very risky. A more typical use was as a buff before a dangerous boss, or as a boost before engaging in PvP.

EverQuest 2: Modest Tools

EQ2 had several types of consumable items, including potions and totems. The most typically-used potions provided modest buffs for a long duration.

There were also restorative potions that worked instantly (or near instantly) to heal damage or cure status ailments. These potions had lengthy timeouts — after consuming one, players could not use another potion for several minutes. This limited restorative potions’ usefulness to dire emergencies only. Useable in PvP, but not typically something that would turn the tide of a battle.

Totems behaved similarly to potions, but had a more unusual effect: invisibility, runspeed-buffs, or transformation into some other creature type are typical examples. Totems could be used five times before disappearing, rather than one time. Totems couldn’t be stacked in inventory, however, so in effect, totems were stacks of five one-use potions in a single inventory slot.

DDO: ???

The one hardcore ex-DDO player I know doesn’t remember how potions worked in DDO, so they can’t have played too important a role in the game. DDO has various stat-boosting and restorative potions, but my vague recollection is that they are only practical at low levels of play — at high levels, they are too expensive to be practical. Can they be used in PvP?

Lord of the Rings Online: ???

Again, my Lotro-playing friends have failed me. “Does Lotro even have potions? I don’t remember…” A quick glance around the web suggests that they have protective potions, but they appear to be rather expensive for the effects they provide.

City of Heroes/Villains: The Core of Loot

Although not called ‘potions’, CoH had ‘Inspirations’ which fill the same role. In a game with very little loot, Inspirations were the notable exception: players got lots of these, and they had a GUI bar just for storing them. Their effects were quite potent, and by using several at once, they could easily turn the tide of a battle.

They could be used in battle, and were intended for such use. They could typically be used in PvP, too. Their effects ranged from potent restorations and buffs to self-resurrections.

Although they could be purchased, the most potent Inspirations could only be found randomly in combat. High-level guilds could have Inspiration-generators in their hideouts, but I don’t know of anyone who did this, and I couldn’t say how useful that was.

World of Warcraft: Emergency Heals

WoW potions are of medium potency: they had noticeable effects but not enough to turn the tide of a battle. Although usable in combat, a player couldn’t drink multiple potions at once: after the first potion of a given category (such as restoration or buffing), they can’t drink another for several minutes or until the effect has worn off.

Their typical use is for “oh crap I’m about to die” restoration, or as a quick buff before a tough boss. Though potions can be used in PvP, their effectiveness is rather limited by the time-outs. In the past, there were numerous categories of buffing potions, so that players could have many simultaneous buffs. This was an effective raiding tactic, but this was changed relatively recently. The number of categories was dramatically reduced, so now only the most powerful player-crafted buff potions have value in raiding.

In addition to potions, players can find “magic scrolls” in loot. These behave the same as buffing potions, but their effects can stack with potions. Players can also select their target for a magic scroll: that is, they could use it on an ally or a pet, rather than using it on themselves, if they wanted to.

More Input Needed

Obviously I need lots more info for this topic! If you have experience with any of these games, especially ones marked with ???, please feel free to chime in. I’m also interested in hearing about other MMOs that aren’t listed here. Thanks in advance!

If you’ve ever been taught brainstorming, in a class or program or whatnot, you know that you’re supposed to brainstorm without tight constraints. That is, you don’t hold each idea up to your constraints as you think of it — you write down every idea you have, and then apply constraints to your list in order to cull stuff that doesn’t fit. You do this partly because it keeps the creative juices flowing while you’re brainstorming, since you aren’t judging each idea. More importantly, many of the ideas that don’t quite fit can be massaged into fitting your constraints. So it pays to get a broad perspective of possible solutions before finding one that fits your exact requirements. The best results come from having the most choices to pick from.

But if you’ve ever been forced to design on the spur-of-the-moment (say on a live team, or in the last few days before a project ships), you’ve probably skipped most of that and just gone with your intuition. If you brainstormed at all in those situations, it was tightly focused. Time pressures have a way of taking the ‘blue-sky’ out of your brainstorming.

Yet, in general you probably aren’t any less happy with those designs than with the ones where you explored every avenue, made careful choices, and prototyped before implementing a full version.

Wait, so you’re just as happy with the intuitive, off-the-cuff designs as you are with the ones you labored over for weeks or months? Hmm, does that mean you’re a genius?!

Sadly, that is not what it means. As Dan Gilbert explains, it’s just a trick of our brains. We tend to be happier with decisions that we can’t change, rather than decisions where we have ample time to rethink things. It has very little to do with the actual quality of our decisions, and everything to do with brain physiology.

The point? Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that your spontaneous designs are as good as your careful, well-thought-out ones. I mean, spontaneous designs are sometimes brilliant. But the odds are that your mind just isn’t being objective about the experience. So when you have time, use the full brainstorm process. Your design will likely be stronger as a result.

—

PS - Go on, click the link above. It’s a 20 minute video, but it’ll go by like a snap. Very interesting material. His book, Stumbling on Happiness, is a good read also. You may not agree with his conclusions, but you’ll definitely be left in thought about his raw data.

PPS - And thanks to Brenda Brathwaite for the link.

The MMO industry is not a particularly sane place to work. It drives people hard and soaks up their passion like a sponge, giving very little back in return. I’ve noticed that MMO game designers go through certain stages as they progress through their career. They may hop back and forth between the stages randomly, but I think it’s often a cycle. It goes like this:

Stage 1: The Eager Newbie

The designer has just landed their first design job and is eager to learn the ropes from seasoned pros. They are desperate for knowledge. They read books like Raph Koster’s and find them deep and interesting. They are hungry for feedback — from their peers, from players, from random people on the street. Anything to help them grow, and quickly!

But over time they realize that most of their peers don’t really have any magic secrets to teach them. The more they interact with the player base, the sadder they are, because players are not kind to developers. They soon come to believe that they have learned all the ropes there are to learn.

Stage 2: The Jaded Artisan

The designer has worked for a while now and doesn’t feel like a newbie. They likely have a key belief like “It’s all about deep story!” or “Balance is crucial for long-term game stability!” or “Dungeon flow is the key to fun!” They interact with the players, but they only absorb the gist of what players say, now. (In the past, they implemented some random player’s ideas and realized that most players are terrible designers, so they no longer really even consider player’s detailed requests.)

But over time they find that their work quality isn’t progressing very quickly anymore. Their key belief starts to seem less logical… they may even come to believe the exact opposite of what they once did. The lack of positive feedback starts to take its toll, too, until the designer no longer approaches their craft in an objective manner.

Stage 3: The Player Hater

The designer has worked on several games (or just been on a live team for more than a year — live teams age you very quickly). They’ve seen players mock their hard work every single time they try to do something brilliant. It almost seems as though players LIKE complaining… so maybe the designer should MAKE them complain! Faced with only negative feedback, the designer decides that negative feedback is GOOD. The designer crafts content that’s tougher, and tougher, and tougher still. They create systems that require players to be extremely good min/maxers just to survive.

The designer takes on an adversarial role with players, all the while saying things like, “Oh, players will complain, but they LOVE it when the new content kicks their ass for a few weeks.” This is sometimes true, but the designer doesn’t really care whether it’s true or not. Subconsciously, they now interpret negative feedback as positive, so it doesn’t really matter what’s right anymore.

But over time they grow bored of trying to evoke passion from players. Without any trusted feedback from any source, they find their enthusiasm waning and their skills no longer growing.

Stage 4: The Burnout

The designer doesn’t care anymore. The stupidity of the gaming industry has overcome them. Budget cuts mean QA won’t be testing the content this week? Sigh, what can you do. The producer wants that perfectly-balanced dungeon redone? Okay, whatever. It’s just a job. The designer puts in their eight hours and goes home. They avoid overtime like the plague (and if they are in a job where they can’t, they have to quit at this stage, or else they’ll soon get fired). They just can’t muster the passion to do amazing work anymore.

There are two paths from here, and they’re equally common: designers can leave the MMO industry completely, or they can work through it. In the latter case, they bide their time. Maybe they take a few months off somehow. Maybe they just stop caring but still manage to put out reasonable-quality work for a year or two, puttering along, until one day…

Stage 5: The Zen Master

The designer wakes up one day and realizes that they understand it all. The simple mantras they believed earlier about story or balance or flow or advancement can now be seen for what they really are: just tiny parts of the big picture. They can finally see the forest, instead of just a few trees.

It makes sense now, and the designer can create amazing work. However, they know it’s easy to fall back into burnout, so they doesn’t work too many hours. And the small stuff doesn’t get under their skin anymore — that way leads to madness. If the designer hasn’t developed an incredibly dark sense of humor already, they develop one now. (You can’t spend more than a few years as an MMO designer without cultivating a horrifyingly dark sense of humor.)

Hopefully the designer can maintain this state for a good while, but eventually they fall back to one of the earlier stages, and the cycle repeats.

Fixing the Designer Cycle

I don’t mean to suggest that this is a good cycle. It’s just how things tend to work. It happens because:

• The work requires long hours for very crappy pay (at least for the first several years).
  • A typical starting designer works an average 60 hour week and gets maybe $30k a year. This works out to about $9.50 an hour, which is about what a teacher makes (teachers are another high-burnout profession). The difference is that teachers don’t have to work 60 hour weeks for prolonged periods of time.
• There’s almost no positive feedback.
  • Players never say nice things. When a player posts on a game forum, it’s usually to complain. If they compliment the game at all, it’s not in a place where the designer can see it.
  • Since the designer works so many hours, they don’t have time to play MMOs much anymore. They don’t see players having fun. Saddest of all, they often don’t even see their own content being played. They lose track of the reason they’re doing this at all.
  • Designers are so busy with their own work that they rarely have time to do solid critiques of each others’ work.
  • In many companies, designers work by committee — they have no autonomy over any game system. So the feedback they get isn’t personal. It’s hard to become invested in the product. (In the worst cases, designers need to get sign off from the entire 50-person team for their ideas. This is extremely draining.)

A lot of this boils down to being overworked: everybody in the MMO industry is overworked, and there are all sorts of trickle-down effects.

Being an MMO designer doesn’t need to be glamorous. It just needs to be a survivable career path. We need to keep designers from coming to hate players, or worse yet, becoming completely burned out and leaving the industry. Ideally, we should strive to push every designer to the “zen plateau” where they’re creating their best work, and then keep them there.

I’ve written quite a bit recently about the situation with Star Trek Online, starting with an explanation of why Star Trek is such a hard IP to make into an MMO and continuing with advice for the team to attempt STO next. Those posts got a lot of comments, leading me to pour a little more fuel on the fire.

One of the more insightful comments asked about a niche game. Why try to appeal to the broadest possible audience? Just make a smaller game for the fans.

If some startup company got the license, that is exactly what I’d propose: make a lightweight space flight simulator, make sure space combat is lots of fun, abstract away the “ground game” (that is, provide a mini-game for it, or just text blurbs and choose-your-own-adventure style options — something very simple), and add systems that support “crews” of players somehow. In other words make a small niche game that very carefully targets hard-core Star Trek fans.

This is a game that will initially appeal to perhaps 25,000 players. If you do the math, that nets $4.5 million a year. That sounds great if you’re a small company of 15 developers. This is exactly the sort of thing that EVE Online did. And if the game turns out to be really fun, your player base can actually expand over time, and eventually hit the 100k player mark or even higher (again like EVE Online did). It’ll never be a huge (half a million plus player) game, but it doesn’t have to be. That’s still great returns for a small company.

The niche game isn’t really an option for Cryptic at this time, though. Cryptic is a larger company with big expenses. Say Cryptic only wants to support 50 employees with the profits from Star Trek Online (which is a low estimate — remember they have well over 100 employees). For 50 employees, they’re spending 5 million a year in salaries and overhead. That doesn’t include the millions that the Star Trek license will cost them, nor the other costs of doing business, like advertising, distribution, servers, bandwidth, and customer support. If it takes three years to make this game, they’ll need a hundred thousand subscribers just to break even. Ideally they’ll be hoping for at least 250k subscribers so that they can easily fund further development (like expansion packs). This means they need to appeal to a much larger audience than the niche game would.

The financial outlook for a niche game gets even more grim when you consider that Cryptic will likely need venture-capital to complete this game — especially since they’re doing the Marvel game at the same time. When you take VC money, you can’t think small. You have to think big. VC firms are looking to earn a 500% increase on their investment. If they give you $20 million to make a game, they are hoping to earn back $100 million within just a few years. This is why every company says they’re going to be a WoW-beater … it’s what venture capitalists want to hear. On the other hand, very few companies actually expect to be a WoW-beater. They are just hoping to grab a few hundred thousand fans of traditional MMO games — maybe 1% of the fantasy-MMO audience — in order to pay their bills and keep the VC folks from getting really angry. (VC folks won’t be happy with just a few hundred thousand subscribers, but they probably won’t disembowel the company right away, either.)

But like I said, I hope the Star Trek license has reached Cryptic, not some smaller startup company. Why do I hope that?

• Making an MMO from scratch is hard. EVE Online managed it, but they are the exception to the rule. Most startup MMO companies crash and burn because they vastly underestimate the tech requirements. Cryptic won’t make that mistake.
• The Star Trek IP costs money. You have to buy that license. Small companies can’t afford to spend a big chunk of their cash on the license and also hope to make a decent game. Honestly, small companies are much more likely to succeed if they make their niche game without a pre-existing IP, like EVE Online did.
• The only way I’ll ever get to have all my Star Trek fantasies come true — a space game and a ground game and interesting missions and so on — is if a larger company does the job, one piece at a time.

So, in conclusion, yes, my advice to Cryptic is to initially pattern their game off of well-understood MMO memes in order to ensure a reasonable population shows up to play. This isn’t my answer to every MMO — but it’s the best answer for the STO situation.

And my advice to a small start up company is to make a niche game, without taking VC money if possible, and to hope that the money situation works out okay. The odds of such a game reaching the market are pretty dismal, but certainly not impossible.

(PS: If you want to know more about VC investment, Paul Graham’s article is a good read.)

The folks on various Star Trek fansites are not pleased with my previous post, and I can’t say I’m surprised. :)

Sorry guys. Here’s the bad news:

• MMO’s are incredibly hard to make, much harder than you think. Perpetual didn’t spend thousands of man-months and fail because they’re total retards. It’s really really hard to make an MMO.
• Star Trek is extra super hard. I know nobody believes these things, and I’m okay with taking the heat for that, but it’s true.
• The developers should stay away from the fan sites early on because you guys are not fans of the upcoming Star Trek MMO. You are fans of the Star Trek MMO you each see in your heads. In 18 months, when there’s a game to actually be a fan of, then you can add to the discussion meaningfully. In the meantime, you’re just trying to inject random features into an already impossibly-complex game.
• You also are just not a good representative sample of Star Trek fans. There’s no good way to say that, and I know how insulting it sounds, but… your voice does not represent Star Trek fandom.
• Perpetual did do a fair amount of research. Real research, not internet polls. And remember how they suddenly went extra-casual? Did you suppose they suddenly lost their minds? No. Research. There’s a whole lot more Star Trek fans who are older and can only play for 20-30 minutes at a time, or who aren’t gamers and can’t deal with realistic space physics or the tedium of exploring space for 6 hours on a manned crew.
• Research shows that it would be financial suicide to make a fast-paced action game, or a realistic space game, as a AAA Star Trek MMO. There’s not a big enough fan base to support it.
• You don’t believe that last statement to be true, and that is why the devs need to ignore you for a while!
• Interacting with the fan base comes at a price. Feeding the fan PR “beast” takes a lot of time and effort, and ultimately slows down development. I think STO started building its fanbase up about a year too early, and it hurt our productivity and strained the fans. I don’t want to see that same mistake made again.

Guys, I don’t really want to play a WoW-esque Star Trek MMO either. I want to play a game where I’m Picard-esque (I even look kinda like him… well, I’m bald anyway!) and I talk my way out of problems, and I have adventures every hour on the hour. But the game I want to play costs about $600 million to make. It’s like WoW plus EVE Online plus a few dozen adventure games worth of really deep and clever content.

It’s not going to happen.

I will settle for an MMO where I can do Starfleet-esque things, where I can explore brave new worlds, and where I can see the cool places I’ve always wanted to explore. I will settle for a WoW clone with Star Trek theming. I will buy it, and if it’s decent I might even stick with it while they get the next chunk of the game done as an expansion, and then the next, and then the next.

And here’s the thing: so will you. If you’re a big enough Star Trek and MMO fan that you’ve been following this game from way back when, I already know that you will settle for this approach, because I can completely empathize. You sure won’t like it, but it’ll work.

In the mean time, the devs will be able to pick up some of the WoW player crowd, and some of the casual gamer crowd too. There’s lots of latent Star Trek fans in their 40s who would love to play occasionally, maybe a few hours a week. But it’s got to be really accessible for them to be able to play.

A few other misunderstandings I wanted to correct:

• They should absolutely listen to their core audience. It’s just that the few thousand folks on Star Trek fan sites are not a big enough core audience to be worth spending this much money on.
• I love Star Trek, and it gets really old to hear “has he even seen such-and-such?” Of course I’ve seen it. Hell, I bet I can out-Trek-trivia most of you! That’s a challenge, and I’d love to have a trivia duel if we meet up at a con or something. But the thing is, I realize that I’m in the incredibly tiny minority of people who know, say, how many symbionts are released per year from Trill.
• If I had infinite money, I would make a very different game. But I don’t, and neither does Cryptic.

Well, the writing was on the wall, and now the wall has blown up. Perpetual’s spin-off company P2 is basically dead. They no longer have a game team; there’s just some web-developers remaining now. My condolences to the devs who lost their jobs in this mess. I hope you bounce back, and I hope your new job is better than your last!

Rumor has it that Cryptic has picked up the Star Trek IP. If true, that’s great news for the franchise, as they’re a seasoned company with talented people. Good luck, guys! But as I talked about earlier, Star Trek is an extremely difficult IP to work with. I want to give the new team some advice gleaned from my time working on STO. What’s better than free advice from the internet? Nothing!

Advice #1: Don’t try to be too true to the license

You’re going to need to watch every hour of Star Trek television and movies ever made. That’s a given. You won’t like about half of them, because only insane people actually like all of Star Trek. But as you take notes, you’ll find yourself trying to nudge things into the nooks and crannies of Trek, so that your game fits just perfectly. It makes us designers feel so clever when we make a design fit existing canon. But you have to watch out: that can easily become a straight jacket.

You’re gonna need loot. Now I know, we never saw a Starfleet officer rifling through the pockets of people he shot. And at Perpetual we were struggling hard to find an “IP friendly” way to deal with this problem. There are some solutions, but honestly? Just make the loot appear on the damn ground and people can pick it up. It’ll be fine. You just don’t have time to make every aspect of your game ultra-canon-friendly. You have to pick your battles very carefully.

You’re gonna need interesting races. Only a few of the Star Trek races are any good for MMO’s. Vulcans, Trill, and Klingons are great choices. You can easily come up with a half-dozen racial advantages for these classes. For the rest of the universe, you’re going to have to scrounge around, and make stuff up. I mean, Bolians, Ferengi, Cardassians, Andorians: these are all basically humans with back-stories and funny make-up. What you need is racial features that enhance the game’s core gameplay. So embellish!

For instance, the TV shows told us that Bolians have extremely acidic digestive systems. So embellish this; give Bolians an acid bite or something. A few hardcore fans will cry foul, but trust me: when Vulcans get nerve pinching and mind-melding while Bolians get a +5 bonus to barbering, you’re not gonna see a lot of Bolians in the world. Don’t be limited to what we’ve seen on TV. Think of it this way: there’s no way to prove that Bolians don’t have an acid bite. They just haven’t gotten around to using it on TV just yet.

Advice #2: Make a fun game loop first

You’re in uncharted waters. You have a really tough IP to work with. Things like killing, looting, and inventory all feel a little awkward to fit into the world of Starfleet. What’s your first order of business? Figure out your core game loop.

In WoW, the game loop is:

• Talk to NPC, get quest
• Run to location
• Kill monsters, collect loot and XP
• Run back to NPC, get reward

In Star Trek, the game loop might be exactly the same, if you’re okay with stretching things a bit. But you might also add “surveying the area” as a core loop element, or add a fun negotiation mini-game. (Good luck! That’s a hard one to do, but totally worth it if you can.)

The point is this: you’re going to make 1,000 quests and 900 of them are going to be very similar. Figure out why those 900 quests are fun. That’s your game loop. (The other 100 can use unusual game loops, much like WoW’s fetch-and-gather missions or escort quests.)

Advice #3: Don’t try to make the ground and space games at the same time

I suspect this one will be pretty obvious, if you’ve been watching all the other attempts at doing both games at once. But just in case you haven’t gotten the memo: do the ground game first, and get the space game out the door 18 months later. It’ll feel really strange without space, and some people will call you nasty names. But you’ll have a source of friggin’ income and you might not go broke. It’s the only way to get through this massive IP.

Advice #4: Ignore the fans

Now I don’t mean you shouldn’t try to make a game that is fan-pleasing. And you should absolutely do market research (with a reputable research firm, not some dumb internet poll). But you need to ignore the fan sites. Two reasons why:

• they all want very different things from Star Trek, so you won’t be able to please even a decent portion of them,
• the people who bother to post on Star Trek MMO fan sites are already going to buy your game. They may bitch about it at the top of their lungs, but they will buy it and play it.

Make a game for WoW players who kinda liked Star Trek. That should be your target audience. Trust me, it’ll be fine.

Advice #5: Don’t go public too soon

You’re going to need about 3 years to get this game out the door. Down deep you know this to be true. You aren’t going to say that publicly, of course, because that isn’t what your money guys want to hear. Officially, you’re going to say that you’ll leverage your core competencies, reuse existing infrastructure, and rely on some of the most brilliant people in the industry yadda yadda. I just hope you don’t believe that. It’s a nasty trap to fall into, because it leads to disappointment.

No, what will happen is that you’ll say it’ll be out in 18-24 months, and then you’ll delay it two times and it’ll ship in 30 to 36 months. That’s okay. It’s a hard game. And if you didn’t have core competencies and all that, I’d predict that you couldn’t do the game at all, ever. So you’re still way ahead of the curve.

But you don’t want to be talking about this MMO for 36 months. That’s 36 news blurbs your community guy needs to write. That’s 36 clever screen shots or mock ups. That’s 1095 days of fans screaming why isn’t it here yet I want it now. These are people who’ve already been waiting for years, too. They’ll wear themselves out.

Be smart. Start talking about the game 18 months from now. At that point, there’ll still be time to make modest changes to the direction based on player feedback, but you’ll have already gotten the core of your game plan underway. You’ll be able to use the feedback to improve the game, rather than being bombarded with too many details too early on.

And good luck, guys! I’m counting on you to break the curse and actually ship a Star Trek MMO. (I promise to buy a copy.) But I do hope you have a healthy respect for the difficulty of what you’re undertaking. As Worf once said, “Only fools have no fear.”

PS - Now I’m seeing rumors that it’s not Cryptic after all. If that’s the case, and some inexperienced team has picked up the IP, well, I hate to say it, but you’re pretty much doomed. But hey, maybe I can help you plan something achievable. My consultation fees are very reasonable. :)

I’m not anti-social; I spend most of my time interacting with
others. (Even soloing, I’m chatting and roleplaying.)

Ethic at Kill Ten Rats recently wrote a post called Where Did the Social Go? that laments the increasing focus on solo play in MMO games. In particular, he seems to feel that supporting solo play reduces the socialization in these games.This is unfortunately an attitude that I’ve run into all too often. As a player who prefers to solo almost exclusively, I vehemently disagree. The simple fact is that I don’t like to group — but I do like to:

• Chat with other players both in-game and out (via blogs, websites, and forums).
• Share game knowledge and help other players.
• Be part of a guild of friendly, helpful people.
• Hang out in town admiring other characters’ armor, pets, and wit.
• Participate in world events side-by-side with other players.
• Roleplay.
• Participate in the economy, both as a wheeler and dealer and as your friendly neighborhood crafter.
• Start new characters on new realms and race against others to level 20.

So tell me again how I’m anti-social? All of these activities involve engagement with other players and none of them necessarily involve grouping.

Shared Worlds, Shared Play

However, Ethic is not entirely wrong. The fact is that, outside of guilds and the economy, there are limited game-supported venues for massive persistent social play. At the beginning of his article, Ethic says:

” … games should be focusing on ways to take advantage of the fact that a large number of people are playing the same game at the same time.”

And he is absolutely correct — we should be taking advantage of our most unique feature. But why on earth would people assume that this means grouping? Grouping involves only a tiny handful of people. It hardly takes advantage of our massive nature at all! It irks me when people say, “Soloers should stick to their solo games,” because the counter-argument is just as (in)valid: Groupers should stick to their group games. I don’t go around demanding solo gameplay out of Team Fortress, do I? Face it: grouping is just one of many gameplay types that can thrive in a massive world, and it has absolutely nothing to do with how many people are sharing the same world as you.

Shared worlds are exciting and addictive because of their persistent and shared nature. There’s a very strong psychological draw that we get from these games because our characters exist somewhere else, somewhere that other people can see us and interact with us. The fact that we’re doing our own thing instead of being chummy 24/7 doesn’t detract from that at all, as we can see from WoW’s success.

Exploiting The Real Power of MMOs

So if neither grouping nor soloing really takes advantage of our key features, what can we do to further the “massiveness” of the game? Let’s brainstorm for a few minutes:

• Let players work together in a casual, no stress setting. How about a drum circle where anyone can walk up and start drumming; when enough characters are drumming, everyone in the zone gets a small buff for the next hour or two. Activate the drum circle on a set cycle (every three hours on the hour, for instance) and you have an optional but purposeful social gathering.
• Let players be creative together. How about an ongoing in-game haiku contest? Characters submit a haiku and then other players vote on it. Participants get points that can eventually be redeemed for cool hats. Once a month, the most popular entries go into an arena-style runoff vote; the winning haiku is performed by an NPC once a day in a main town.
• Let players network. Allow characters to hold membership in multiple guilds, or alternatively to form non-guild player associations for other purposes (roleplaying, crafting associations, class knowledge banks). And we could even map out the connections … You think a map of which faction owns which territory is cool? How about a live map of the network of player associations?
• Let players flaunt their success. Players are most excited about the persistent aspect of the world when their actions persist even when they are offline. KvK games where players can “own” castles and whatnot are a good example. Other examples are shops in town that players can own or rent, NPC’s that brag about how they met so-and-so high level player, etc. Maybe some towns let players “name” important locations. For 60,000 gold, the Ironforge Gate could be renamed “Joebob’s Ironforge Gate” for a month.
• Encourage small-scale competition. Another way for players to have a minor, modestly persistent role in the world is to compete. But if you do this on a massive scale, most players aren’t competitive. To make competition work in an MMO, you break it down to smaller groups. Perhaps each town has a leaderboard for a local game. One town has a sign that lists the top twenty players who have collected the most murloc heads in 10 minutes. Another town has a sign that lists the twenty players who have fallen from the highest points in the world and lived. These signs might reset each week or month.

These are just some off-the-cuff ideas, but as you can see, there are lots of ways to build on MMO’s core strengths. The unique character of MMO games is built on shared experience in a shared world. No matter what some old-school designers think, solo play does not violate that character, nor is grouping the only valid way to emphasize it. There is so much more we could be doing with this medium.

It can be frustrating for players who like grouping to think that there are millions of players out there who want to play MMO’s without grouping. As Eric wrote earlier in “Learning the Wrong Lessons from WoW“, this is a common misconception among game designers as well. But if you look at the vast possibilities in a shared persistent world, you’ll see that there are way more choices than just “playing by yourself” or “playing with 2 to 5 other individuals”. This isn’t some Xbox Live FPS. This is a shared persistent world. Think massive. Think long-lasting.

Okay, so 2D isn’t state of the art. But two-dimensional characters are. How many indistinguishable NPC’s have you run into in your travels through Azeroth or Norrath or wherever? More than you can count. I’ll let you in on a secret: quest text really is fodder. There’s nobody behind the scenes writing up the bios and storylines for these shmuck NPCs. A quest implementor writes that text as quickly as possible and goes on to the next one. And usually, the task of writing filler quests is given to the junior quest implementors, to boot. Quest text like this:

This text is nearly the first thing you read in WoW, if you start as a Tauren. You’d expect this to be some of the best quest text in the game. But no. Why is this terrible? Just for starters:

• It makes you read things that turn out to be irrelevant
• It’s boring
• It tells you nothing — zip, nada, zilch — about the NPC
• It teaches you that reading quest text is a waste of time

Sometimes quests are unglamorous. That’s just a fact of MMO life. But when a quest is unglamorous, you have to work extra hard to make the NPC interesting.

Or how about this quest excerpt?

Notice the line I highlighted? That’s the line that says, “Everything you just read was a waste of your time. Ha ha, you’re stupid for still reading quest text. Haven’t you learned by now?

There’s a reason that players never read quest text, and it’s because MMO’s teach them not to. I’m picking on WoW here but rest assured that I could find similar NPC’s in every MMO. And I admit that I’ve written some stinkers myself. Making interesting NPC quest text is hard, and you need a ton of text, and I don’t have an easy solution.

Okay, actually I do. Have you noticed that occasionally an NPC is memorable? To use WoW again, there’s this one guard in a nondescript inn who asks you to collect the heads of nearby murlocs. And when you get back, he asks you to do it again because his boss didn’t believe he did the work himself. And then he asks you to deliver all the heads to his boss, because they’re gross and slimy. He’s somewhat memorable because he’s a jerk. Now, he’s not REALLY memorable, obviously, because I don’t remember his name. But he’s a start. If everyone in WoW was at least this memorable, players would be raving about the “story” in WoW. Alas, 99% of the NPC’s are utterly indistinguishable.

That guy’s character can be summed up trivially: a lazy oaf who wants to pawn his work off on other people. He’s a two-dimensional character at best. But compared to the zero-dimensional characters all around him, he’s deep like Hamlet. So, this is where quest writers should start. It’s a trick that tabletop game masters have been using for decades: give every NPC some memorable aspect. Nothing fancy, just a simple detail. You can brainstorm a list very easily, but I’ll get it started.

How about an NPC that…

• Hates clouds
• Adores his puppy, which is actually a full-grown wolf
• Keeps trying to get you to try his cooking
• Speaks in rhyme
• Keeps laughing at very inappropriate times
• Has a giant purple hat, of which she is very proud
• Believes the local store owner is actually Santa Claus
• Wants to quit his job at the inn and become a lion tamer
• Runs a failing steamed-rutabaga vendor stall

You can still make really boring quest text, even if you have a quirk like this. We’ve all seen that happen. You have to take the time to write something interesting; there’s no magic bullet. But this is magic gunpowder, which is the next best thing.

Now take it a tiny step further. Give each town something memorable. What if this town…

• Is full of mimes
• Is having a feud with the town across the river
• Is full of aristocrats who despise common adventurers… but need their help
• Has a strictly-enforced dress code
• Has a very unusual religious belief
• Has just been terribly conned by a snake-oil salesman

Not everyone in town should fit this two-dimensional profile. Say, perhaps two-thirds should fit it in one way or another, though.

It all sounds lame, doesn’t it? Cheesy. Stupid. But yet… look at the quest text we have now: it’s so banal that nobody anywhere actually reads it. These “cheap tricks” will help us take NPC’s to the next level, which is admittedly level 2. Some day we might be ready for NPC’s with actual depth. But let’s do one dimension at a time.