This isn’t an MMO news site — we try to focus on practical advice, not ongoing drama — but recently Blizzard made a particularly interesting decision that I want to use to illuminate what goes on inside a dev team. And believe me, unless you’ve seen it first-hand it can be difficult to believe what actually goes on inside a dev team.

A Decision Badly Communicated

In WoW Patch 2.3, Blizzard inadvertently introduced a new creature (a ghostly wolf) that was obviously not intended to be tamable by hunters, but which could be tamed through very clever use of game mechanics (including putting together a small group and dropping a couple hundred gold in specialized equipment). This wolf had no special qualities other than a transparent appearance and no gameplay benefits over other wolves in the game. Players loved it because it looked cool, but it was obviously a mistake so they asked for clarification from Blizzard … and got it: a Blizzard CS Rep posted in the European forums that Blizzard had “no plans to address this issue - it will still be possible in future for everyone who wishes to tame this NPC to do so.” Unfortunately, six weeks later Blizzard apparently changed its mind; the ghostly wolves were removed in a stealth hotfix early one morning. Frantic inquiries resulted in a post by a Community Manager on the US forums, that said: “Through a hotfix we’ve recently removed the ability to tame a Grimtotem Spirit Guide [ed. -- that is, the ghostly wolf].” Although no direct reason was given for the change, they were apparently concerned about the precedent set by “(t)he unintended nature of the taming, the undead status of the guide, appearance of the wolf in relation to the feel of the hunter class, and the complex processes of taming”. Players who had already tamed a ghostly wolf, by the way, got to keep their pet.

To sum up, Blizzard removed content that did not affect game balance after stating that they would not remove the content, and they did so in a stealth hotfix with no prior notice despite the fact that doing so caused a number of players to waste their hard-earned gold.

It’s Not That Simple

Now, I’m not here to rant about this as a player. (Plenty of people are doing that elsewhere!) But let’s look at this situation as a developer: Obviously this isn’t great for Blizzard — it will blow over (as these things always do), but in the meantime it’s doubtless causing some headaches for their CS and Community teams, especially increased CS tickets (which means increased wait times for everyone). Things like this are almost never the core reason that players quit the game, but as we’ve seen from exit surveys they are often the straw that breaks the camel’s back — the trigger that prompts a fence-sitting player to cancel their subscription. A situation like this is not the end of the world, but it’s definitely to be avoided.

So why did Blizzard handle this situation the way that they did?

Sometimes an unpopular, unannounced change is well worth the cost, if there is some good reason to make the change — for example, if a bug threatens game balance and announcing the fix beforehand increases the chance that a lot of players will exploit the bug. And it is even possible to come up with a situation in which a detailed explanation cum apology afterwards is a bad idea because other similar bugs may still remain. But was that the situation here? Since the bug was a misplaced content flag and they let hunters who had already tamed the beast keep it, that seems unlikely.

Sometimes the best reasons for a change aren’t visible to players — and aren’t intended to ever be known by players. For example, as producer of AC1 I once decided to delay a fix for an unfortunate economy-wrecking crafting bug for several weeks. Why in the world would I do that? Because our publisher was in charge of hotfixes; because I wasn’t satisfied that the personnel they had available was sufficient to perform a hotfix safely at that time; because the political situation between us and the publisher was such that attempting to negotiate a safe hotfix would have severely hampered other, more important development priorities; because I knew that in the end, the game would recover from the bug, but I couldn’t guarantee that the team would recover from pissing off the publisher. I’m certain that from the players’ point of view, my communications about that situation were appallingly obtuse. But again, that hardly seems likely to be the situation here.

What Really Happened?

I can’t actually tell you why Blizzard decided to handle the ghostly wolf matter the way they did. I don’t know anything about the internals of WoW’s development process or team. But I’ve seen similar situations develop so many times that I can make a pretty good guess as to what happened. The following fictitious story could easily happen at any of a half-dozen MMO companies:

So. It all started when CS was bombarded with questions about the ghostly wolf. The lead on duty first tried asking the Community team if they knew anything about it. CS and Community don’t always get along — Community is too close with the Marketing team, and everyone hates and fears Marketing — but at least they answer e-mails, unlike the damned Dev team. But unfortunately Community didn’t have a clue either, although they had been noticing similar questions.

And CS was left to pick up the pieces.

The Big Secret

The big secret is that the typical team of 40+ individuals is completely incapable of working as a single entity. There are cliques, there are squabbles, there are stupid dramas getting in the way of everything. Most dev teams suffer from incredible levels of internal miscommunication and politics.

Whenever I interview with an MMO company, I talk about the need for strong internal communication. Most of the time my interviewer just smiles and nods. They usually believe that they already have great internal communication. They are always wrong. Strong communication doesn’t just come from conveying information — it also requires trust, understanding of intent, passion for the game, and the ability to put aside personal disputes for the good of the team.

A live team can become one coherent whole and when that happens everybody is so much more productive, it’s incredible. A gelled team is a beautiful thing, and once you’ve been part of one you will never want to work any other way. But bringing strong organization to a team of 40+ requires extremely masterful leadership as well as hard work, plus some good old-fashioned luck.

[By the way, if the concept of "gelled teams" is new to you, I recommend the classic book Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister.]

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.

I’ve been reading quite a bit lately about how subscription MMO games are on their way out, soon to be replaced entirely by free-to-play MMO games with upsell or micropayment features.

I was also reading a post by Seth Godin recently that included the advice “Whenever possible, sell subscriptions.” In particular, he made the comment that:

Few businesses can successfully sell subscriptions (magazines being the very best example), but when you can, the whole world changes. HBO, for example, is able to spend its money making shows for its viewers rather than working to find viewers for every show.

And this lead me to wonder: We know that a game which embraces microtransactions will need to be designed differently from the ground up. But what does that actually mean? What does a micro-transaction game look like?

One big difference is that we’re no longer talking about a democratic society where every player is an equal. (That’s one of the big reasons that players in the US react negatively to micropayments — both Americans in general and RPG players in particular are very attached to the idea that effort leads directly to reward and that money is a dirty shortcut.) But it just doesn’t make sense for a game developer to lavish the same resources on everybody equally when only a few people are actually paying the bills.

Let’s extend the HBO example. HBO is a subscription service; it is most concerned with adding and retaining subscribers. It does this by producing quality shows that appeal to its audience. In theory, HBO needs to provide just enough content each month so that any given subscriber feels that their subscription cost is justified. Once a subscriber is satisfied that the subscription is worth the cost, spending additional resources on that particular subscriber is a waste — it’s better to move on to satisfiying another customer. This is fairly similar to a game like EQ2 in which expansions and regular game updates provide a broad variety of new content, with just enough depth in each area for different types of players to feel justified in continuing their subscriptions.

In contrast, we can look at the Home Shopping Network as an example of a microtransaction model. HSN provides free content to everyone who tunes in, and profits only when viewers make a purchase. The majority of their income derives from a small fraction of viewers who each spend quite a large amount of money. A slightly larger fraction of viewers spends just a bit of money each, and the vast majority spend almost no money at all. In this environment, the most efficient profit strategy focuses all your resources on the big spenders first and foremost. HSN programs are very carefully tailored to appeal to the big spenders, the people who give them the most money. So long as the big spenders still have money to spend, the best strategy is to target them narrowly.

These are both perfectly viable business strategies, by the way. HBO uses its large subscriber base to focus on high-quality content for all the subscribers. HSN can make tons of cash from only a tiny portion of its audience, so it doesn’t need as many dedicated viewers as HBO in order to be profitable.

So an MMO based on micropayments would focus heavily on the big spenders. An MMO like this is unlikely to provide regular content updates: it’s just not an efficient use of resources to provide too much extra content for players who aren’t paying. And for the players who are paying it’s more effective to give them something new to purchase once a week or so (to encourage repeated small purchases) than to dump a whole bunch of items on them all at once. In fact, it’s likely that a micropayment MMO would largely forego expansions (free or paid, boxed or downloadable) as well, for the same reason. Instead, their development model will likely embrace constant small paid additions (which is going to be a real pain to QA, let me tell you!).

More than that, however, these MMOs will be trying to reach each individual player in an entirely different way than we do now. For instance, if enough heavy spenders would really like a particular niche item — say a giant Cat-in-the-Hat style hat — then it might make economic sense to create that item and sell it. And depending on the cost of resources and the purchase price of the hat, ‘enough’ spenders might be only a few hundred! In a subscription MMO, on the other hand, it is much harder to make the case for niche items like that because all the content needs to appeal to a much larger audience — it needs to help justify a broad swath of subscriptions. So one effect of the coming revenue model revolution may be that our games give up some of their vast breadth in favor of highly targeted depth.

Of course, there are plenty of business models for MMO games that blur the lines between subscriptions and micropayments. But in any case it will be fascinating to see what happens to our assumptions about development as we develop into a more diverse ecology of online games.

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.

Apparently Grimwell tagged Sandra to do industry predictions for 2008. But she said she was just going to turn around and immediately tag me to do more, so instead we sat down to write a list together. Here are our predictions for the MMO industry in 2008:

• Hasbro launches their secret stealth project: the new Care Bears MMO. Sadly, it is quickly overrun with Real-Money Trading (RMT), which points out a serious imbalance in the dueling system. After a disastrous first six months, the remnants of the game are bought up by SOE.
• After seeing the WoW commercial starring William Shatner, Turbine hires Leonard Nemoy to promote LOTRO. His touching rendition of “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” is a huge success and LOTRO’s population finally grows enough to open their first new US world.
• Warhammer Online launches, but only 300 people manage to purchase boxes; everybody else is unable to distinguish it from World of Warcraft and buys the wrong game. After Warhammer fails it is bought by SOE, who muddies up the graphics, lowers the quest quality, and reopens the game as “EverQuest 3.”
• During beta, Age of Conan discovers that players aren’t quite shocked and disgusted enough by the rampant rape of female characters. In a desperate bid for the all-important adolescent crowd, Funcom adds first incest, then necrophilia, and finally bestiality to the game. This brings down the wrath of PETA, who firebomb their offices. The few survivors are quickly hired by SOE.
• Bioware finally announces their big secret, the one that industry insiders have known for years and players have been whispering about for months: Bioware has no MMO engine, has no idea how to make an MMO engine, and can’t buy one since there aren’t any working MMO engines for sale. Instead of trudging along making a doomed MMO, they make KOTOR 3 for the XBox 360, and everybody’s happy.
• Blizzard continues to ignore everyone everywhere and do whatever they please. They continue to have record-breaking sales and subscription numbers, and they are not bought up by SOE.

All in fun, guys! You know we love ya. :)

RMT (Real Money Trades) are a big topic in blogs again — as they are every few months, it seems — but I think most people miss the key problem with unregulated RMT.

Not too long ago, EverQuest 2 was overrun by gold spammers, and it was very annoying. Players started hypothesizing that SOE didn’t take extra steps to stop these spammers because it earned SOE money: the spammer buys an account, spams a while, gets banned, and then has to buy another account, which means SOE earns more money each time they ban a spammer. Except players forget that these spammers aren’t nice folks who legitimately buy accounts. In SOE’s case, the most egregious spammers bought all their accounts with stolen credit card information — info taken from people they made real-money trades with.

So here’s what happens: some random stupid player buys $30 worth of gold with his credit card, then one day logs in to find that his account had been banned. And then he gets his credit card bill and sees that all 40 of his accounts have been banned… except he only owned one account. He then calls his credit card company, the charges are reversed, and SOE doesn’t get a dime — in fact, they lose a good bit of money in transaction fees and wasted time spent dealing with the problem.

MMO companies don’t like to talk about how much credit card fraud occurs in the industry, as you can probably understand, but it’s a problem for everybody. Most big-time gold sellers are not in the US, and we don’t have a lot of ways to control them. These people have also shown a propensity to not play nicely. It’s in the game industry’s best interest to wipe out illegitimate gold sellers in every way they can.

For the record, I don’t much care one way or the other whether players can spend money to get gold. Most of the hand-wringing that game designers do about it ruining the challenge of the game is a big load of hooey. Sure, there are some dangers involved if RMT becomes extremely rampant, but a decent design team can keep everything working just fine. However, I have been against RMT in games I’ve been involved with, and for a very practical reason: a large and vocal portion of the player-base hasn’t liked it. And in general, if my players don’t like something, I don’t want it in my game.

But even if my target audience was okay with gold selling, I would still work to stamp out illegitimate gold sellers, and I hope every MMO does, too. Otherwise, MMO’s will earn a reputation as a pit of fraud and larceny.

Whatever your stance on real-money trading is, I hope we can all agree that unregulated RMT’s should be stamped out whenever possible.

I saw a post over on Warcry about a new “Vampire MMO”, apparently called Darkeden. Feeling especially bored, I tried to follow the link to the game’s page so I could sign up, but the site is down — looks like they got too much traffic. Oof. That’s devastating. They likely missed their opportunity to get a large number of people involved in their beta.

But thinking about it, I realized that I don’t try a lot of downloadable MMO’s (or open betas) because the investment is too high. I have to go sign up for some stupid company account. I have to download a large file. Install it. Run it. Probably do some email verification thing, too. Too many steps! As my available gaming time has become smaller, my willingness to jump through hoops has shrunk tremendously.

As a designer, I’ve seen first-hand that most game companies don’t pay enough attention to how their new-player sign-up/download process works. They’re busy making the game. The website is an afterthought. This is a deadly mistake.

This is one reason why I think the long-term future of MMO’s is in web-based games that can be started within 30 seconds — there’s less crap to get in the way. But if you want a 3D game, web-based designs aren’t really viable yet. So what can you do? To make the best of players’ tiny attention spans, follow these rules:

• Your landing page should show me a screenshot, tell me three REALLY DAMNED COOL things about the game, and have a huge TRY IT NOW button. Make sure the page loads fast, too. The goal is to get me to click TRY IT NOW before 10 seconds elapse and I get bored.
• Once I try it, get the downloaded started immediately. Don’t screw around, get it started fast. Once the download starts, AND ONLY ONCE IT’S GOING, I will be willing to spend a tiny amount of time signing up for your service.
• The sign up page should have not more than Name, Password, and Email Address. If you ask for more info up front I’ll probably wander off. You don’t need more info in order to let me try the game for a bit.
• If you need to provide email verification, make it trivial.
• You can ask me for my credit card info when I’ve decided to make a sale — not before that!
• Don’t make me sign up for forums and company accounts and newsletters and all that other crap. All that stuff makes you lose potential customers.

There’s a common excuse for requiring the credit card up front: it helps keep abusive people out of the system. If a player acts inappropriately, you can ban their credit card, thus keeping them from signing up for any more accounts. Very clean!  And it worked great ten years ago, but times change. Nowadays, you’ll just have to design your game more carefully, so that your game doesn’t give free-trial customers any ways to abuse others.

Remember, you need to get people playing your game before they get bored or distracted. Streamline the entire experience with this in mind. Don’t assign this task to interns, either. This is a job for savvy web designers. In fact, the sign-up experience should be at the top of the list to be polished. It needs to be 100% perfect in order to get as many people trying out your game as possible.