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.

World of Warcraft just launched their winter holiday content, aka the Feast of Winter Veil, and that got me thinking about how enjoyable seasonal content can be to develop. But as usual, there are also some caveats. So here, in no particular order, I present my tips for seasonal content development. Note that these are not limited to the winter holiday events — they can apply to summer festivals or independence celebrations just as easily.

1. Develop a consistent philosophy of seasonal events. Most modern MMO games treat seasonal events as generally light-hearted activities accessible to players of all types and levels and with a strong roleplaying component.
2. Make a yearly schedule of events. Work out which seasonal events you will be celebrating — before launch if you can. This way you can schedule the necessary resources from the beginning and space out your events so they don’t all clump up in one part of the year.
   • For example, EQ2’s largest seasonal event is Frostfell, their winter celebration. Unfortunately since that game has settled into a once-a-year expansion launched in mid-November, and much of the team is traveling and on vacation starting in mid-December, Frostfell has become a real scheduling problem.
3. Plan to reuse much of your hard work each year. Develop a basic event that meets your goals (for example, accessible content for all levels, if that’s your goal) and then vary this slightly every year. New players will find the entire thing interesting and new, while players who have been with you awhile with appreciate both the lasting traditions of the event and the new tweaks that keep it fresh for them.
   • The variations each year can be relatively simple. Have a few small side quests and rotate them, one or two in and one or two out each year. Or do the same with souvenir items: this year you can get a red Santa hat or a green Santa hat, but next year it’s red or gold and the year after that red or silver. Remember that rotating items out is just as important as adding new ones, but it’s also fine to bring an item back after a few years.
   • Many teams give an event to a favored designer and turn them loose to “be creative”, but be very careful about that. Seasonal events are fun to design, which means that unless your designer is very disciplined, you’ll soon have sunk more time and effort into it than you have planned. And if the event becomes ‘Bob’s hallmark’ then next year some other designer will want to top it to prove their worth — and there goes your careful plan of efficient reuse.
4. Don’t make the event too short — you need to give the majority of your players the chance to participate. Generally I’ve found that a full week is the shortest appropriate length for a seasonal event. You can easily extend this to 10 days (from Friday morning to the following Monday morning) if you want to encompass two weekends.
   • And there are exceptions: April Fool’s Day, for example, is generally best handled as a single day of festivities.
5. Don’t make the event too long. Jolly music and silly buffs begin to wear rather quickly, and a shorter event will help keep the enthusiasm for the holiday high.
   • There are exceptions here also, of course — because so many players will be traveling during the winter holidays, extending that one to cover three to four weeks may be the best approach. (On the other hand, this means that you need to be even more careful about content that gets wearisome — especially those Christmas jingles!)

Even with such a seemingly simple topic as seasonal fluff content, there are a lot of factors to think about. But a modicum of planning up front can make the holiday just fly past smoothly, with no muss and minimal fuss.

I find it very interesting that WoW’s death penalty is much harsher than the death penalty in EQ2, which goes against our preconceived notions of these two games. Let’s look at the facts:

World of Warcraft Death Penalty:

• Death causes damage to your equipment.
• You are expected to run a long way to your corpse and then reappear in a dangerous area, taking time and risking a second death.
• Your other option is to resurrect at a graveyard, whereupon your equipment suffers serious damage (likely requiring you to trek back to a repair NPC immediately), and you are unable to fight for ten minutes.

Everquest 2 Death Penalty:

• Death causes damage to your equipment.
• You accrue a very small penalty to future earned XP.
• You respawn at a safe spot.

WoW’s “travel back to your corpse or sit for ten minutes” mechanism, combined with the danger of dying again when you reach your corpse, makes it more of a nuisance than EQ2’s penalty. But here’s the real kicker, the reason that puts WoW’s penalty high above EQ2’s: WoW’s graveyard spots are not particularly safe. I remember my first trip to Scarlet Monastery: I got very lost and ended up in extremely dangerous territory, and died. And then I died again and again. Finally I respawned at the graveyard, only to discover to my horror that horrible monsters found me in the graveyard, too! I was instantly killed AGAIN. In WoW, when you’re in an area that’s much too high-level for you, monsters will come for you from miles around, and they are nearly impossible to escape.

In fact, I would have been stuck at that graveyard forever, except for a glitch in WoW that they’ve never bothered to fix: if you log out and log back in, your ghost can then travel to a different graveyard spot and respawn there instead. But you have to log out and log back in first, and you have to know about this trick. This is well-known among a certain part of WoW’s audience, but is certainly not known to everybody playing WoW. And when a game’s death penalty can result in effective perma-death of your character (unless you know how to exploit a bug), it’s hard to call your death penalty “casual”.

Compare it to EQ2, where death is a mild nuisance and then you get on with your evening. It’s much more casual friendly. You don’t have to run out into the same horribly dangerous spot and risk your life a second time. On the other hand, I’ve heard people complain that death in EQ2 is so tame that many people become careless, which gets groups killed.

Just to be clear: I’m not complaining about this. I don’t mind that WoW is more aggressive in punishing death than EQ2 is. (Neither of them are anywhere near as tough as, say, EQ1’s death penalty, which was so punitive that it regularly made people quit the game forever.) But it does go against our stereotyped assumption that EQ2 is more “hardcore” than WoW.

The Purpose of Death Penalties

But what should the death penalty be? What’s the point of a death penalty?

Some games don’t have much of any death penalty at all, such as Dungeon Runners. These games are aimed at players who are looking for a game that engages and entertains them, but doesn’t particularly challenge them.

Most MMO’s, however, have relatively punitive death penalties because they are designed for players that want to be challenged, not just engaged. The theory goes that if a game doesn’t punish you for playing poorly, then your rewards for playing well will be hollow and without much significance. That’s true to an extent … but of course, that’s only true if “playing well” is your motivation for playing the game.

But the death penalty has other side-effects, too. If the penalty is lenient, players find themselves experimenting with more tactics, exploring the landscape more, and poking into nooks and crannies of the game. If the penalty is harsh, they tend to stick with the strategies they know. Good survival strategies become more valuable, and in many games, players find that grouping together makes for a better survival strategy. So we often find that strong death penalties correlate with more grouping.

Correlation of death penalty to other aspects of MMO gameplay.

The exact death penalty should be based on the target audience you want to reach. This is a gross simplification, of course, but it helps point out some of the ramifications of a particular death penalty. There are many other correlations, too, such as Time Expenditure, Opportunities to Zerg, and Rewarding In-Game Knowledge. None of these are hard and fast rules, and will vary depending on the exact details of the death penalty, but I think they hold up pretty well for a large number of penalties and games.

I think both WoW and EQ2 are towards the “lenient” end of the spectrum. But is WoW’s death penalty too harsh or too mild? Well, the current death penalty is obviously not a deal-breaker for 9 million people — then again, we don’t know how many more people they would have if it was harsher or more lenient! If I were making a new game, I’d make it more lenient. EQ2’s more-lenient death penalty was more enjoyable to me than WoW’s, and I’m not exactly casual, so I think going lenient is the safer bet for modern MMO audiences.

I love Star Trek. I worked as the systems designer on Star Trek Online during its early preproduction period, and I was (and am) excited about the design we had come up with for the game. But that said, it seems that Perpetual is dying more all the time, and it looks like Perpetual will succumb to its mortal wounds before STO gets out the door.

That’d be a shame, but it wouldn’t be the first such tragedy to befall people who attempted a Star Trek MMO. There were two MMO attempts before this one, both by other companies which eventually collapsed.

At first glance, Star Trek seems like a perfect setting for an MMO. It ranks up with Star Wars, D&D, and Lord of the Rings as one of the top four nerd IPs that cross over into mainstream acceptance. But appearances can be deceiving. It’s actually a huge landmine of problems.

The Double Game

In order to do Star Trek right, you need to make two games in one. You need to make a space game and a ground game. This means Star Trek is a “double game.” What’s Star Trek without space battles? What’s Star Trek without away teams exploring strange new worlds? You need both. This is almost impossible to pull off, especially by a team that doesn’t have a stable engine to work from. Even SOE couldn’t pull this off for Star Wars Galaxies — they launched with only a ground game and added the space game later (to which most people cried “too little, too late”).

Space Is Hard To Do (Well)

Space MMO’s are actually relatively easy to code, but that doesn’t automatically make them fun. Space is inherently boring. This is a psychological problem: on Earth we have waterfalls, spooky forests, pits of magma, rivers, and on and on. We have hundreds of instantly-recognizable terrain features to use on the ground, and each of them comes with preconceived notions of how we should feel. (Dark forest = spooky, rickety bridge = tension, idyllic plain with butterflies = relaxing, etc.) We have a huge vocabulary of concepts that can act as shortcuts in world design.

However, in space, it’s hard to come up with more than a dozen easy-to-name features, and they don’t carry much emotional impact anyway. So even if you make up lots of space phenomena, players don’t feel differently about them. In the end, space tends to feel homogeneous. In order to overcome that, you have to work very very hard.

For Star Trek, this is compounded by many additional factors that make it even harder! For instance, there are insane size disparities. Players want to pilot capital ships like the Enterprise-D. But these ships are so ridiculously massive that they dwarf smaller ships that should also be pilotable, like Deep Space 9’s “Defiant”. Allowing both sizes of player ship would be like having playable races of tiny hobbits and 100-foot-tall giants in the same game. It’s not easy to make content that makes sense for both large and small, so you have to compromise. Everybody gets a big ship, or everybody gets a small ship. Or you split your content between big-ship content and small-ship content. Or you cheat on the sizes and all the purists complain.

Another big problem is that 3D space combat is actually very hard to comprehend by many people. It’s one of those “you get it or you don’t” things. So a space MMO needs to work out a compelling combat solution that’s fun for people even if they have a hard time telling north from south, let alone up from down.

Any of these problems can be solved, but it’s the compounding of problems that makes it tough. And we haven’t even talked about the fan expectations yet.

Fan Expectations Are Impossible To Meet

The hardcore fans want an MMO that is far different from a typical MMO, and I don’t just mean the difference between a space game and a fantasy game. Let’s just name a few places where the hardcore fan base’s expectations cause tension in the design:

• There’s tension about economy. Captain Picard famously said in “First Contact” that there is no money in the Federation and human beings no longer concern themselves with the acquisition of wealth. Purists want a game that meets this requirement, but your average WoW player would be pretty disappointed by a game without loot, money, trading, and auction houses.
• There’s tension about the setting. Star Trek is a Utopian future. It is in fact pretty much the only popular Utopian future — most sci fi worlds are pretty grim. MMO’s need conflict to drive them, but when you add permanent conflict to the Star Trek world, you damage that “Utopian” feel. In Star Trek, problems generally get solved within an hour and the world returns to a happy place once again. This puts extra requirements on MMO content creators.
• There’s tension about what you’re supposed to be doing in the game. A hardcore fan might want to be in a crew with 20 other people working together aboard the USS Enterprise, taking shifts in real-time, climbing through Jeffries Tubes repairing minor problems, and doing survey missions. A more casual fan just wants to be a Captain Kirk figure with their own ship, gallivanting across the sky killing bad guys and hitting on green chicks.

Okay, so you can find workable compromises for all of these with enough effort. But it gets worse when you realize that even the hardcore fans all have different takes on Star Trek. See, most fans like one series but not others — for instance, they may love Deep Space Nine but hate Voyager. However, the universe works pretty differently in each show, and you can only understand the big picture of Star Trek by taking every show into account. But they don’t want you to do that. (e.g., “Don’t use Voyager episodes as canon, that show ruined Star Trek!”) In other words, it’s basically impossible to make all Star Trek fans happy, or even a majority of them.

And should you even try? The active Star Trek fanbase has been plummeting for years, ever since Voyager ended. (”Enterprise” did not provide a noticeable boost in fans.) The next movie(s) may strengthen it, but that’s just a “maybe” for now. Right now, even if you could make all Star Trek fans happy somehow, you wouldn’t have a successful MMO. An MMO that costs 50 million to make simply must reach a larger audience. This means doing things like adding player economies and letting everybody be a ship captain — moves that piss off the hardcore Star Trek fans.

Star Trek MMO is a Kobayashi Maru

Making a fun and successful Star Trek MMO is incredibly hard. It will take brilliance, experience, patience, and lots of money to pull it off. Even if Perpetual had the game-shipping experience and monetary backing of a company like Blizzard or Turbine or SOE, the Star Trek IP would still be a tough nut to crack.

Although Perpetual has made some clever choices and has brilliant art, I suspect that their fiscal situation dooms them. This makes me very sad, for obvious reasons.

If Perpetual doesn’t make it to the finish line, that’ll make three failed attempts. Will we ever see a Star Trek MMO? I suspect it can only happen when there are cheap commercial MMO engines, so that making a “double game” isn’t such an insanely difficult undertaking, and so that the game can be monetarily successful even if it doesn’t go after the broadest-possible market. Some day…

EDIT: to clear up some misconceptions I’ve been seeing, I no longer work for Perpetual, although I wish them the best of luck. I wasn’t fired from Perpetual; I left when my wife was offered the position of Producer for EQ2. It was a difficult choice and not one I made lightly — I still have friends at Perpetual and I hope they make a great game. I just have a hard time being optimistic these days. :)

Cameron Sorden on Random Battle asked a very good question recently in his post How Raiding Hurts WoW More Than It Helps:

So why does Blizzard make a community with a majority of non-raiding players raid, given all the problems it causes? Why do they spend so much time and effort on designing, developing, and tuning zones that only 1-6% of their subscribers ever use?

But Blizzard has answered this question themselves. I’ll paraphrase from the AGC talk I attended a couple of years back: Their audience is a donut with the hardcore in the center and the larger, fluffier casual crowd in a ring around that. The hardcore is especially important because they are the ones who convince other players to try the game out. These people are, in the language of The Tipping Point, mavens and connectors. They know the game inside and out and they sit at the hubs of the largest guilds, eager to recruit others into their world.

So to answer Cameron’s question, Blizzard builds content for a tiny fraction of their subscribers because those particular subscribers are directly responsible for recruiting and maintaining the other 94-99% of subscribers. So it’s not a waste — it’s actually quite economical!

Except, of course, that the theory is wrong.

Hardcore players are not universally recruiters. They don’t have a monopoly on knowledge or social networking. Mavens and connectors exist within the hardcore population, sure, but they exist outside this population as well, and in greater numbers. Nor are casual players always the passive recipients of this game evangleism. Players recruit other players who value the same kinds of gameplay — hardcore raiders recruit other hardcore raiders; PvPers recruit PvPers (aka victims); roleplayers recruit roleplayers.

In the past — say, before WoW — it may have been true that the raiders had the most organized social connections and spent the most time talking about their obsessive hobby, and that their efforts caused a ripple effect through the interested-but-slightly-less-hardcore that was the rest of the smallish gaming world. But it’s simply not the case any more. We’re seeing the same shift in focus in the gaming press, and for the same reasons: Look at the growth of the narrow niche fan site, or the widespread growth of personal gaming blogs as compared to the slow but steady demise of print magazines and gaming megasites.

So yes, I believe in Blizzard’s donut model — I just think they’ve mis-labeled the rings. And given that, I also am puzzled as to why they keep pouring so much time and money into creating content that only the tiniest fraction of players will ever see — or care to see. I suspect it’s because life on a live team is often too fast-paced to let you step back and really think about what you are doing.

(And for the record, I swear we’re not picking on Cameron on purpose. It’s just that he keeps writing interesting posts! And commenting on this post of his, inspired as it was by one of Eric’s posts, gets points for being pleasingly circular as well.)