If you aren’t a veteran Games Workshop fan then this post will make no sense to you. Shoo! Go away! This one isn’t for you.

So at the weekend I was over in the UK indulging in my secret vice which happens to take place somewhere between Nottingham and Derby. Many years ago I lived in Nottingham and so I like to visit friends and my favourite stores whilst I’m there and so it was that as I was killing an afternoon before the flight home, I found myself in the Friar Lane Games Workshop store. Had a bit of a chat with the staff as you do then I browsed the books for a while. Not long after, another chap walked in and the staff did their customary greeting and sizing up routine to determine if he was a true believer or simply a confused passer-by. As it happened it was Jake Thornton - former White Dwarf editor, games developer, Fanatic Press manager and all round Nice Chap. If you cut him crossways you’ll probably find the letters of Warhammer going through him like a stick of rock. Needless to say the staff didn’t recognise him and so he and I had a bit of a reminisce and a general catching up with what had happened since I had left GW.

The accidental meeting however did remind me of possibly my favourite memory of my time in GW. We (being the games development team) had gone into Nottingham to buy reference books to use as source material. As it happened, the big Waterstones was right opposite the GW store on Friar lane in those days (this is when the Design Studio was still on Castle Boulevard and so it was only a short walk round the corner for us). On the way out we decided that we’d say hi to the guys in the store and so we crossed the road and wandered in. We had Andy Chambers, Nigel Stillman, Tuomas Pirinen, Gav Thorpe, Ian Pickstock, Warwick Kinrade, Andy Kettlewell and myself. Apart from me (who was still pretty new) all of these guys were featured multiple times with mugshots in every issue of White Dwarf, we barely had time to let the door close behind us before the over-eager red shirt came bounding up to us.

‘So’ he says, ‘Do you guys play the games then or are you looking to have a demo?’

Good times.

Don’t worry I’ll talk about computer games again soon.

Looks at date.

Looks at datestamp for the last post here.

Yeah I know.

Anyhow, I’ve been super busy and in fact still am super busy. I’m off to Dreamhack tomorrow which will be fun in new and exhausting ways. Then I’m back in the office for a couple of days before gadding off again, this time to a field near Derby where I’ll be on holiday doing much the same thing that I do at work but with fewer creature comforts and without the whole ‘online’ thing.

Anyhow, I wanted to talk today about something I read in a magazine recently.

Some of you may have seen or heard about the review of WAR that was published in the June edition of PCGamer. They were fairly critical of the game which is their right and I’m not going to get into a long and involved post about the specific criticisms they levelled at the game - I think you can guess what my general editorial tone towards WAR would be. Instead I want to talk about a claim that was made at the start of the article.

I’m paraphrasing a little here because I left my copy at work and I’m writing this at home but essentially it went like this:

“The first ten minutes in an MMO is critical. If the game fails to grab you in that time then it has lost.”

Basically the first couple of paragraphs is expounding on the opinion that an MMO has ten minutes to hook you in.

Rubbish I say.

Unless the game is so horrible that it’s physically painful to play, the first ten minutes is not even a factor. Of course you want people’s first impressions to be full of shiny, but after they’ve futzed around in the character creation system, logged in and got an eyeful of your starter zone the next ten minutes is purely groundwork.

If anyone quits after ten minutes then your game is either so broken that even a killer new player experience won’t save it or that person was always just going to quit after ten minutes and you had no way to convince them to do otherwise.

The first MMO that I played properly was Dark Age of Camelot*. I really don’t remember my first ten minutes although I suspect it involved hitting frogs near Ardribard’s Retreat in an ineffective manner. My first ten minutes in EvE online was probably spent wondering how much longer the tutorial was going to go on for. In LotRO, my Tolkien fanboy rage was rising as I found that I had to rescue Elrond (Elrond!) from a couple of not-very menacing looking Goblins within seconds of logging in with my brand new Elf. In fact that’s pretty much the only MMO intro I remember with any clarity, even more recent forays like Pirates of the Burning Sea and Hellgate: London don’t especially grab my attention. I vaguely recall PotBS having a rather irritating scripted intro that went far too slowly but it wasn’t that which made me decide not to subscribe.

While the initial experience should be as awesome as possible, it’s rarely if ever any indication of what the game proper will be like. For the most part the first ten minutes are spent introducing you to the various parts of the UI and explaining the backstory to a greater or lesser extent. Here’s a huge generalisation for you because we like lazily pigeon-holing people around here:

There are two kinds of MMO gamers. You have the clickers and the readers. The clickers want to get going as fast as possible so they click on all the guys that look important and ‘accept’ on all the dialogue boxes as soon as they open. The reader wants to know why the Secret Goblin Cabal is trying to get the Sceptre of P’lotdev Ice and why them having it would be a bad thing. He (or more commonly she) reads the quest information, looks for the NPCs who give the backstory spiel and doesn’t do anything actually game related until the scene has been properly set and the main actors identified. Both of these people care about the new player experience in different ways, the clicker wants to get on with blowing the crap out of stuff without all that boring exposition and tutorial stuff, the reader wants to know that there’s more to the world than just random monsters to thump. What turns one of these players on will be a disappointment to the other.

There is however an important demographic for whom the first ten minutes is critical but it isn’t the MMO player.

It’s the MMO reviewer.

* I had previously tried to play UO but it was ugly and hard. I still gave it significantly more than ten minutes however.

A few weeks ago I ran a small survey of people’s information gathering habits about games. It wasn’t very scientific in nature and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get enough responses for the sample size to be large enough to draw meaningful conclusions from, but with 64 replies it did better than I hoped. ANyway, for those who are interested, the results are after the cut.

I asked ten questions about the way that people prioritised information about games and where they tended to go for trustworthy news.

Here are the questions with the collected results.

1: Which of the following types of game related websites do you read (please delete all that do not apply)

• News sites (for example TenTonHammer, IGN, Gamespot etc) - 50/64 (78%)
  
• Community forums (for example a guild or clan forum, or general computer game discussion forums such as VN boards, F13 etc) - 58/64 (91%)
  
• Official game sites (sites operated by the developers or publishers of a game) - 47/64 (73%)

So clearly the average respondent is pretty widely read on the world of video games. It’s interesting though that many people who read community forums never read regular games news sites or the official sites of games.

2: Do you actively seek out news and information about upcoming games that may interest you?

• I follow games I’m interested in very closely - 29/64 (45%)
  
• I check out upcoming games I’m interested in every so often to see what’s happening - 29/64 (45%)
• I actively avoid finding out information about games I may be interested in - 0
  
• I don’t actively look for information on games I’m interested in but if a friend sends me a link then I’ll check it out. - 0

The totals are less than 100% due to some people not understanding the question or answering in a non-committal manner. In general though we can see that the respondents keep reasonably up to date with upcoming games with almost half of them following development very closely.

3: Are you an MMO player?

• Yes I play multiple MMOs currently -16/64 (25%)
  
• Yes I play one MMO currently - 28/64 (43%)
  
• Yes although I am not currently playing any MMO - 18/64 (28%)
  
• I have never played an MMO nor am I planning to do so. - 1/64(2%)

A fairly even split with a pretty much expected bell curve. Single MMO players form the bulk with lapsed and multi-game players forming an roughly equal curve on either side. Given that an MMO can be a significant time investment, it’s not hard to see why this is.

4: How many MMOs have you played for more than the trial period/beta?

• One - 3/64 (5%)
  
• Two - 7/64 (11%)
  
• Three - 11/64 (17%)
  
• Four - 8/64 (13%)
  
• Five or more - 32/64 (50%)
  
• None - 1/64 (2%)

Only a very small number of respondents had only played one MMO in their lives (or none for that matter). Half have played at least 5 and 80% have played at least 3. This makes them veterans of the genre for the most part (I hesitate the use the word hardcore, as it everyone loads it up with their own definition baggage).

5: Which would you say is your main source of information about games that interest you?

• Official game sites - 17/64 (27%)
  
• Community sites or word of mouth from friends - 45/64 (70%)
  
• News sites - 8/64 (13%)
  
• I don’t know or I don’t look for information like this - 0

This one cemented what I felt instinctively and also reaffirmed my own experiences. People learn about games from other people or communities, not from marketing outlets for the main part. In otherwords, the best marketing vector is the friends of the target.

6: Which of the following would you be most likely to trust?

• A news article on a professional game news site - 15/64 (23%)
  
• A news article on the game’s official website - 17/64 (27%)
• A news article written and researched by a fan on a community site - 25/64 (39%)

A reasonably even split here with a bias towards information from sources that are perceived as being closer to the community. I didn’t frame this question very well, I should have said opinion piece rather than news as the intent was to find which source people assumed would be least biased or most fair.

7: Please indicate how trustworthy you generally find each of the following (rate from 1-5 where 1 is barely credible and 5 is an unshakeable faith).

• A news article on a news site that you do not generally read - Average 2.19
  
• A news article on a news site that you read regularly - Average 3.5
• A news article on the game’s official website - Average 3.42
• A news article on a community site written by a fan that you know personally - Average 3.9
• A news article on a community site written by a fan that you do not know personally - Average 2.44

Again I intended this to be an indicator of how unbiased a source was but still the results are interesting. People trust news sites of unknown provenance less than they trust random fans on a message board. Of course they trust fans that they know more than any other channel.

8: Roughly how many of the following types of website do you read regularly (at least once a week)?

• Game forums (official or otherwise)
• News sites aimed at gamers
• News sites aimed at computer industry professionals
• Official game sites (operated by a developer or publisher)
• Blogs by gamers
• Blogs by game developers or other industry professionals

I didn’t collect the stats for this question as many people didn’t understand how to answer it. When going through however forums were by far the most popular followed closely by news sites aimed at gamers. Blogs were the least read of all with industry news sites and official sites forming a rough median.

9: Please rate the following factors in your choice of game to play. Provide a rating for each of 1-5 where 1 is not a factor at all and 5 is an overwhelming factor in a game’s favour.

• Many of your friends are already playing the game or intending to do so- Average 3.65
• Information from the official website - Average 2.82
• Good previews/reviews in the gaming press - Average 2.85
• Good reviews from friends - Average 3.94
• Developer’s track record (your experiences with their previous games) - Average 3.65
• A friendly community on fan forums - Average 2.48

Interestingly the expectations of a developer were equally important to players as the desire to play alongside their friends. I have to admit I wasn’t expecting that and I fully expected the first response to be the runaway favourite. Again though personal recommendation and word of mouth counts for more than press reviews.

10: Finally, which of following games is the one that you are most likely to try? (delete the one that does not apply)

• A game which has received bad reviews but that is enjoyed by your friends - 56/64 (88%)
  
• A game that your friends did not enjoy but has received glowing reviews  in the press - 8/64 (13%)
  
• I don’t read game websites - 0
  

No surprise at all here and it strongly reinforces the previous points about where people are most influenced in their buying decision. I would have been shocked if the disparity was smaller to be honest.

So there you have it. Veteran MMO players, mostly get their impressions of games and make up their mind to try or not based on what their friends think and what the scuttlebutt is on the various community forums. News sites and official sites play an important part of course but mostly they are feeding the vast meta-community gossip machine.

I know I said I wouldn’t talk about WAR here but this is too cool to share. I’m home sick today but last night we were given a press brief to distribute from today. I hope I’m not pre-empting anything here. The brief is from the EA Mythic studio manager April de Poisson and it’s about the patch system for WAR.

Everyone knows that when an MMO launches the real hard work has only just begun.  Despite the fact that typically these games are in development for more than 3 years, there is still a lot to do post launch. Bugs to be corrected, new content to add so that the players don’t run out of things to do and of course balancing. Now this last item is probably the hardest thing about any MMO and that counts double when the MMO has any kind of PvP mechanic in it. We can all think of several games that have massively missed the balance bus and we remember them for just that and not any of the otherwise great features they may have had.

Worse, every single player, developer, community manager and forumite has wildly different views onwhat needs to be done to achieve this mythical balance. Nerf this class? Buff that one? Rework this mechanic? Add utility to here? Strip overpowered abilities from there? It’s all a bit like spinning plates on poles except that the plates are invisible and your hands are tied behind your head. Oh and you have to spin the plates with your ears.

Since Mythic was acquired by EA, they’ve had access to some of the sharpest and slickest coding teams around, people who can put games out on the shelves at a staggering rate and that’s the kind of expertise that EA Mythic are going to put to use on WAR. What will happen is that rather than continue to patch WAR for balance and content, a new version will be shipped every year. This new version will completely remix all the class abilities and power balance so that everyone will have to figure out from scratch what is over and underpowered - and by the time they’ve done that, a new version will be hitting the shelves!

Here are some FAQs

Q: Will there be no patches at all?

A: The only patches will be to fix game stopping bugs. Such bugs include but are not limited to:

• Bugs that prevent you from logging into your account
• Bugs that adversely affect the stability of a user’s PC.
• Bugs that threaten to destabilise reality and cause the End Times to occur.
• Bugs that open rifts to alternate dimensions.

Actually we’re just kidding about that last one. Rifts to alternate dimensions are awesome. They may be filled by hot blue alien chicks and that’s a risk we’re prepared to take frankly.

Q: What will change from each version to the next?

A: Lots of things! The developers will use their expert judgement and a state of the art binary RNG system to determine which features will carry over from one version to the next. Each version will be numbered for easy identification and so that players will always know that they are using the latest (and greatest!) client. So this year you will be playing WAR ‘08 and just in time for the busy Christmas season you’ll be excited to get your hands on WAR ‘09! Not everything will change of course, large bits of code will be copied and pasted into the next version with only enough differences to justify a new version number and shake up the experience for players. Who said making games was hard?

Q: Will different versions be able to play together?

A: Sadly no. You will always need the latest client. This is for technical financial reasons that are all to do with server architecture, shareholders, platform leveraging and shareholders.

Q: Can you comment on the rumoured console release for WAR?

A: Not at this time but look out for cross platform functionality added in WAR ‘11 and ‘12! We’re excited to be working with some of the biggest players in the console market - Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and those people who make the’150 retro games on a preloaded console’ things.

I need to gather some stats and I’d like to ask readers or visitors to this blog for their assistance.

I can’t imagine that any one reading this blog doesn’t fit the profile but just in case, please only answer if you are a player of computer games.

All I need you to do is to copy and paste the following questions into the comments field and add your answer to each one where relevant. You don’t need to register to take part but please don’t submit the poll multiple times.

Here are the questions:

1: Which of the following types of game related websites do you read (please delete all that do not apply)

• News sites (for example TenTonHammer, IGN, Gamespot etc)
• Community forums (for example a guild or clan forum, or general computer game discussion forums such as VN boards, F13 etc)
• Official game sites (sites operated by the developers or publishers of a game)
• I don’t read game websites

2: Do you actively seek out news and information about upcoming games that may interest you?

• I follow games I’m interested in very closely
• I check out upcoming games I’m interested in every so often to see what’s happening
• I actively avoid finding out information about games I may be interested in
• I don’t actively look for information on games I’m interested in but if a friend sends me a link then I’ll check it out.

3: Are you an MMO player?

• Yes I play multiple MMOs currently
• Yes I play one MMO currently
• Yes although I am not currently playing any MMO
• I have never played an MMO nor am I planning to do so.

4: How many MMOs have you played for more than the trial period/beta?

• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five or more
• None

5: Which would you say is your main source of information about games that interest you?

• Official game sites
• Community sites or word of mouth from friends
• News sites
• I don’t know or I don’t look for information like this

6: Which of the following would you be most likely to trust?

• A news article on a professional game news site
• A news article on the game’s official website
• A news article written and researched by a fan on a community site

7: Please indicate how trustworthy you generally find each of the following (rate from 1-5 where 1 is barely credible and 5 is an unshakeable faith).

• A news article on a news site that you do not generally read
• A news article on a news site that you read regularly
• A news article on the game’s official website
• A news article on a community site written by a fan that you know personally
• A news article on a community site written by a fan that you do not know personally

8: Roughly how many of the following types of website do you read regularly (at least once a week)?

• Game forums (official or otherwise)
• News sites aimed at gamers
• News sites aimed at computer industry professionals
• Official game sites (operated by a developer or publisher)
• Blogs by gamers
• Blogs by game developers or other industry professionals

9: Please rate the following factors in your choice of game to play. Provide a rating for each of 1-5 where 1 is not a factor at all and 5 is an overwhelming factor in a game’s favour.

• Many of your friends are already playing the game or intending to do so
• Information from the official website
• Good previews/reviews in the gaming press
• Good reviews from friends
• Developer’s track record (your experiences with their previous games)
• A friendly community on fan forums

10: Finally, which of following games is the one that you are most likely to try? (delete the one that does not apply)

• A game which has received bad reviews but that is enjoyed by your friends
• A game that your friends did not enjoy but has received glowing reviews  in the press

Thanks very much if you take part in this. I’m aware that it isn’t very scientific and that my sample size is likely to be too tiny to take meaningful data from but I need some kind of rough reference at reasonably short notice.

I’ve been rubbish at updating recently I’m afraid. Partly it’s due to being enormously busy but mostly due to my propensity for being distracted easily. So let’s get the distractions out of the way first:

• Forumwarz
• Eve Online and Eve Poker.
• WAR Beta
• Guild meet up
• The Cult in concert

Yeah, I’m weak.

So anyway that’s enough about me. Let’s talk about computer games. A perennial issue for the entertainment industry as a whole is piracy and computer games have been feeling the burn just as much as Hollywood or the music industry. Particularly PC games where their native environment lends itself so well to casual piracy. Let’s get the moralising over and done with. Piracy is theft. People can try to justify their actions if they like but if you own a copy you didn’t pay for then you stole it. Sadly stealing seems to be seen as cool amongst the mouthbreathers who make up the loudest part of the internet.

Here are some interesting perspectives from different industry sources.

The Titan Quest Dev.

Two, the numbers on piracy are really astonishing. The research I’ve seen pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia. I didn’t believe it at first. It seemed way too high. Then I saw that Bioshock was selling 5 to 1 on console vs. PC. And Call of Duty 4 was selling 10 to 1. These are hardcore games, shooters, classic PC audience stuff. Given the difference in install base, I can’t believe that there’s that big of a difference in who played these games, but I guess there can be in who actually payed for them.

Let’s dig a little deeper there. So, if 90% of your audience is stealing your game, even if you got a little bit more, say 10% of that audience to change their ways and pony up, what’s the difference in income? Just about double. That’s right, double. That’s easily the difference between commercial failure and success. That’s definitely the difference between doing okay and founding a lasting franchise. Even if you cut that down to 1% - 1 out of every hundred people who are pirating the game - who would actually buy the game, that’s still a 10% increase in revenue. Again, that’s big enough to make the difference between breaking even and making a profit.

Titan Quest did okay. We didn’t lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today. You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can’t change how people behave… whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren’t so rampant on the PC. That’s a fact.

That certainly puts the issue in some perspective and to an extent it’s backed up by some quick-and-dirty analysis from Rock Paper Shotgun

Thirdly, let’s try a little really rough - if conservative - maths. Call of Duty 4 has been on sale for 113 days, assuming day zero piracy. A seven gig torrent, assuming a 100k download speed, takes just under a day to download. Assuming that the rate of downloads now is constant across those whole three and a bit months - which is incredibly conservative, of course, as it’d have been much higher upon release - that means 993496 copies will have been illegally downloaded via Mininova alone. Which is the sort of number that makes Infinity Ward sad.

Again the chap from Infinity Ward agrees:

On another PC related note, we pulled some disturbing numbers this past week about the amount of PC players currently playing Multiplayer (which was fantastic). What wasn’t fantastic was the percentage of those numbers who were playing on stolen copies of the game on stolen / cracked CD keys of pirated copies (and that was only people playing online).

Not sure if I can share the exact numbers or percentage of PC players with you, but I’ll check and see; if I can I’ll update with them. As the amount of people who pirate PC games is astounding. It blows me away at the amount of people willing to steal games (or anything) simply because it’s not physical or it’s on the safety of the internet to do.

However at the last, putting the cat amongst the pigeons comes Draginol from Stardock who claims that piracy isn’t a problem after all:

When you blame piracy for disappointing sales, you tend to tar the entire market with a broad brush. Piracy isn’t evenly distributed in the PC gaming market.

Blaming piracy is easy. But it hides other underlying causes. When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue.

In the end, the pirates hurt themselves. PC game developers will either slowly migrate to making games that cater to the people who buy PC games or they’ll move to platforms where people are more inclined to buy games.

In the meantime, if you want to make profitable PC games, I’d recommend focusing more effort on satisfying the people willing to spend money on your product and less effort on making what others perceive as hot. But then again, I don’t romanticize PC game development. I just want to play cool games and make a profit on games that I work on.

Now to me, Draginol’s comments seem a little contradictory. He seems to be saying that if you don’t make the kind of games that are likely to be pirated then piracy stops being a problem, therefore piracy shouldn’t be affecting PC games. Errm…

He makes some nice points about ‘rockstar games developers’ and the obsession with shininess over substance - which I rail against in this industry as much as I rage inwardly every time a new plot free, CGI fest is released by Hollywood. Essentially however his message seems to be that pirates have won, you either abandon the PC as a platform for anything approaching an AAA title or you accept that you’ll be developing the game for a loss due to the fact that the vast majority of your players are going to steal your work. Both of which are depressing prospects.

His penultimate point is spot on however, pirates are hurting all of us through their actions and we will all pay for those actions - either in super restrictive DRM or in games that we want to play being available solely on platforms where piracy isn’t so easy for the average user. We all lose so that Johnny Mouthbreather can extend his epeen by being part of the cool crowd that get their games for free.

Once again RMT (Real Money Trading) is in the news. First the various lawsuits against IGE - one from a former director and one class action suit which are putting the squeeze on the world’s biggest RMT operator. Then the news from Sony that they were splitting off their Station Exchange service to Live Gamer and finally the settlement between Blizzard and RMT/powerleveling company Peons4Hire.

Phew!

I am very much anti-RMT in games that aren’t designed specifically around the concept and mostly I think these developments are all positive. Certainly the Blizzard/P4H settlement is a major breakthrough. It’s not a judgement so it sets no legal precedents but it does serve to draw a line in the sand and demonstrate that the major developers are prepared to back up their anti-RMT policies with action. It’s fair to say that Blizzard are very much leading the charge against undesirable ingame activity.

Obviously the settlement only affects one of the many RMT operators active in WoW, but with any luck this is a shot across the bows of the rest of them and further action will be forthcoming from Blizzard’s legal department.

The other WoW lawsuit, the class action suit against IGE is probably going to end less happily. I’m not a lawyer but I don’t see this case getting anywhere. There are too many technicalities and murky waters to navigate. Hopefully though, Blizz themselves may decide to weigh in, emboldened by their success against P4H and point their legal deathrays at IGE. One of the contentious points is that IGE asserts that they are not signatory to the ToS or the EULA. If nothing else comes out of this lawsuit then hopefully this will be clarified and a legal precedent set. However the court decides I think this will be a good thing for game companies. Obviously if the court upholds EULAs then a big sigh of relief willecho around the industry, if the decision goes the other way then the various legal departments involved will have to come up with a robust and enforceable alternative. Either scenario is going to be better than the murky on/off situation we have now.

Staying with IGE, the lawsuit brought by former IGE exec Alan Debonneville against former IGE CEO Brock Pierce also has a lot of potential. Not only is it nice to see jackals turning on themselves, the  allegations that are flying around are serving to demonstrate exactly why these sort of operations harm games. In his depositions so far Debonneville has laid out how companies like IGE ruthlessly exploited bugs and duped gold to sell in the quest for profits.  The only downside to the whole drama is that only one of them can lose.

Finally then we come to the Sony Station Exchange episode. For those who haven’t been paying attention, this was launched a while ago as a way to have specific servers enabled for RMT via a secure interface - essentially players could buy and sell item. The idea was to reduce the support overhead that RMT brings with it by controlling the RMT channels. I commented at the time on the white paper that SOE published on it.

Now it seems that although support overheads have dropped, the basic problems remain unscathed. Strangely the farmers didn’t decide to stay away from the servers where their RMT was sanctioned. Whodathunkit?  So now the service has been ‘transitioned’ over to Live Gamer - an RMT company that has been trying hard to get developers on board to legitimise its activities. The main reasons  given are that it was hard to prevent fraud and also that it didn’t deter farmers. For the first issue, making it someone else’s problem is a bonus for Sony but not really one for the players. Presumably if the fraud issue was a major problem for SOE, then it will also be one for Live Gamer and so the players will still have to jump through some hoops - except this time they will be third party hoops - in order to do business. The second issue is even more puzzling. Embedded in the arrangement with Live Gamer are various clauses preventing them from dealing with known farmers and anyone that SOE tells them not to. I find it hard to see how SOE can keep the same level of oversight in the activities of a third party partner that it does over its own system. Again, this smacks mostly of deniability, now all the problems will be someone else’s fault.

It’s heartening to see that developers are tackling RMT, either aggressively through the courts like Blizzard, or through trying to exert a modicum of control as SOE are doing. I’m not convinced that SOE are doing the right thing but at least they are creating talking points rather than just sweeping it under the carpet. All of this demonstrates admirably that if you’re looking at ways to deal with RMT after your game has launched then you’ve started about 3 years too late.

I recently got a bit of a surge in viewer numbers here and, checking the stats, it seems that quite a few people are coming from this WoW forums thread to visit a link post I made regarding PvP MMO design. It’s a little odd because I didn’t actually say anything on the subject in that post, I simply pointed to a discussion that was raging elsewhere. However a good chunk of people seem to be headed this way to see what it is that I have to say for myself on that subject. Never one to disappoint, here I go.

Firstly I think we need to determine what a PvP MMO is, or at least what a marketable PvP MMO is. WoW apparently isn’t a PvP MMO despite the fact that the main end game activity is fighting other players in ranked arenas. EvE might be a PvP MMO but it has carebear areas so the jury is still out on that one.

If you ask a veteran PvPer what they want then their eyes will mist over and they’ll go back to glory days of shivving noobs on pre-Trammel UO, Shadowbane, Mordred/Camlann or whatever. What these players are looking for is an open world, free for all environment in which might makes right and the devil take the hindmost.

Games like that existed five years ago (practically an epoch in computer game terms) but generally don’t any longer. People who played them and clamour for something similar again claim that mostly this is due to those games launching in a hideously broken state. Probably this is mostly true but not entirely.

The real reason as to why those sort of environments don’t last long is because making games like that which work is hard. Along with the multitude of pitfalls waiting to trip up unwary designers in PvE centric MMOs are a whole new bunch of evils that lurk beneath the surface ready to pounce. Mostly these are community problems and are to do with the way that people play games like this. Additionally they are to do with the reasons that people stop playing games like this too.

I’ve said it before but when you are pitching an MMO to your audience, you aren’t so much offering people a game but a community. You’re asking them if they fancy spending four nights a week and the occasional weekend at your place for the next 18 months or so. Early adopters are impressed by shinies and game design, latecomers go where their friends are. So anything that kills your community will also kill your game. Bad development can assuredly do that, only masochists stick around to play broken games, bad design or bad management however can do it just as well. Anything that kills your community will also kill your game, and the problem with most free for all PvP games is that they aren’t conducive to strong communities.

So, before you start figuring out how much damage a fireball should do or whether stealth as a mechanic is fundamentally broken, you need to answer a few questions

• “What will keep people who get their arses kicked, playing my game?”
• “How do I foster a strong sense of community while not allowing unbeatable hegemonies to arise?”
• “How do I reward people for fighting each other without making the loser quit and the winner invincible?”
• “How do I give new people in this game a fighting chance against a mature population without trivialising the achievements of veterans?”
• “Why are there thousands of Darkfall fans camping my forums, telling me how to design an MMO?”

Actually that last point can mostly be solved by employing a suitably gnarly crew of moderators, but I digress. In FFA PvP games the design needs to work against large scale community and co-operation, you want people to fight each other not to hold hands. If people are too chummy then you get some snowballing powerblocs and pretty soon the endgame can become irrelevant for anyone who hasn’t jumped on board with the cool kids. So you split people up and as a result people feel distanced from all the stuff that makes for healthy subscriber numbers.

Churn is an important point too. The early adopters will race to max level and form the primordial power structures, some people will quit for all the usual reasons and hopefully new players will join to take their place. These new players will also quit pretty sharpish if their experience consists of being repeatedly violated by the early adopters and their friends. At this point you are entering a recursive loop where people are leaving because they don’t enjoy getting owned and the people doing the owning are leaving because there’s no-one to wtfomgbbq.

FFA players want to be able to create their own societies and their own factional communities but in reality this is too important a point to be left up to players. Half of them won’t bother and then quit because the game doesn’t cater to soloers or casual players or players with wildly erratic playtimes, the other half will bother and get it wrong. Because it’s not their job to balance your game.

If the players can’t be entrusted with this then it has to come from development - and core development at that. It’s not enough to tack on a guild system or an alliance chat channel, there have to be pre-existing affiliations that will support players who don’t want to or are unable to create their own and which are capable of replacing player systems for any given player. These can run parallel to player structures (as in EvE’s NPC corporations) or vertically (as in the RvR systems of EA Mythic).

So what have we learned?

• Whatever you do is wrong
• Anything you get wrong will break your game
• Making players run the game is bad
• Making a PvP MMO in the traditional DIKU mould will probably fail
• If it doesn’t fail then it probably wasn’t a PvP MMO to the people who care about such things
• You will be by default attracting the type of players that other MMOs would pay to give you
• Those players will work against your efforts to win over the type of players that you really do want
• When your community dies it is your fault, notwithstanding the above point
• Community is hard and you have to design around it from the beginning.

I should have been back at work today however due to a family emergency I’m still 7 time zones distant from my desk. As a result I’m sort of telecommuting in an unofficial capacity whilst the slack is being taken up by my colleagues back in sunny Dublin. As I was looking forward to returning to work (and most certainly not looking forwards to the circumstances that are keeping me here), I’ve been doing a lot of work related stuff at my in-laws PC.

This enforced absence from actual productive work alongside my regular exposure to game related discussion has had me mulling over a few things recently. I’ve been trying to get things internally consistent before I put them down in writing but I figure that’s what the edit button is for so here, for those who care, are my thoughts on MMOs and why they are the way they are.

First off, I should begin by explaining that I’m really talking about Western style MMOs and specifically those which contain an actual game. Second Life-alikes, Micro-transaction driven ‘virtual worlds’, web 2.0 stuff and the like are outside the remit of this particular discussion. So we’re talking traditional MMOs or DIKUs (Don’t I Know You) here.

So then, let’s make a list of things that define an MMO:

1. Massively Multiplayer play. Perhaps obvious but it’s the difference between Hellgate and Diablo. The ability to have a lot of players all affecting the same game environment simultaneously.
2. A persistent world. The game should continue even when a particular player isn’t experiencing it.
3. A game. Some kind of overarching framework that ties all the activities of all the players together and gives them meaning and a frame of reference.

That’s pretty much it as far as required elements goes. All of those points are pretty vague and open to a lot of interpretation - particularly the last item. When we talk about MMOs, the game we usually take as read for that genre is of course the role-playing game.  These come with a lot of baggage and conventions from their roots in pen and paper games which were all translated verbatim into single player RPGs when we all moved to digital made-up guys. So, just like their neolithic counterparts, MMOs tend to feature levels, experience points, quests, skills, spells, magic items and so forth. Of course for sci-fi MMOs you can substitute ‘advanced tech’ for ‘magic items’ and ignore or reinterpret the whole ’spells’ schtick.

None of the items mentioned above are specifically needed for an MMO (or for that matter an RPG), they simply provide a well-known set of reference points that players can use to orient themselves within the game that is offered. Where they come from is a need for familiar landmarks and a certain amount of assumption.

Let’s list some assumptions that drive modern MMOs:

1. The game needs to be deep. Without depth it won’t retain players - especially if they have to pay to play.
2. The game needs to reward success. Success in this case can be anything from actual victory over enemies to outwitting game elements or simply spending time ingame.
3. The game needs to provide a framework that allows players to compare their progress directly.
4. The game needs to be playable within the constraints of technology and a median level of equipment for the user.
5. The game needs to give you a reason to come back and try again if you fail.

Depth is an important point that is often overlooked. Depth in MMOs usually comes down to nested minigames within the over-arching metagame. For example the actual game might revovle around killing monsters to gain xp and advance in level but the process of doing that becomes defined by subsystems that are essentially minigames in their own right - pull the monster without getting all of its friends along too, time the special attack combo correctly, heal the party members without running out of power or letting any of them die, timing it exactly right to get the optimum number of ranged spells off before the monster reaches you, etc. Then of course you have the secondary minigames - crafting, guilds, building equipment sets and so forth.

Number 4 is an important point too. Many players bemoan the fact that combat in MMOs is still largely based on static RPG models rather than the more exciting and more interactive FPS type. Largely this is driven by factors that games developers have no control over - internet latency and the need to cater to a wide variety of client platform specs.

None of those assumptions however explicitly require the feature list for RPGs. Rather the feature list has expanded to fill the assumptions rather than a whole new set of mechanics being derived from new cloth. Some games might do away with some of those elements (EvE has no XP or levels as such for example) but, in general, they are all present to some degree.

And they don’t need to be.

How about a purely narrative game where you gained no XP for killing monsters but advanced instead based on an overarching storyline told through quests? It needn’t have levels or any of the other RPG staples either, you could grow in a non-linear, organic manner rather than along a narrowly defined track.

How about a game where you started off in control of a small group of characters (a tribe, gang, band of men-at-arms or so) and could play one of them at a time to build up their collective power? If your main PC died, you’d lose some of that advancement and would switch to a secondary character - who would have already experienced a degree of advancement thanks to your earlier efforts.

How about a game where combat is reduced to an arbitrary mechanism in which the stronger side wins and diplomacy is the main thrust of the game. Stronger in this sense doesn’t need to mean bigger, a smaller force can be the stronger side thanks to strategic positioning and tactics.

Shamelessly nicked from loads of people. Richard Bartle asked the denizens of Terra Nova why fantasy games are disproportionately represented amongst MMOs.

 First let’s have a picture:

That’s a lot of purple.

Let’s start by expanding the question. MMORPGs are essentially another form of RPG and those have always been dominated by fantasy titles, whether we’re talking pen and paper, single player computer games, MUDs or MMOs - any game where you are encouraged to identify with and develop a character is more likely than not to have a fantasy theme.

If we go back to the dark ages of gaming where we had polyhedral dice as RNGs, an eraser as a character editing tool and Citadel miniatures for eyecandy, nearly all of the games we played were a fantasy theme. In fact all of the big ones were. The various flavours of D&D, Rolemaster, MERP, WHFRP, Supernatural Creature: The Verbening, Palladium etc etc. Yes I know, you are old like me and you can remember Traveller, Cyberpunk and Star Wars the RPG but frankly they were the exceptions to the rule. Mostly we were concerned about our THAC0 rather than our skill ranks in Blaster Pistols.

Then we got computers. Rubbish ones by todays standards but they were full of win and awesome at the time. We played RPGs on those and they too were mostly fantasy themed - Zelda and the deluge of JRPGs, Gold Box D&D games, Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, Elder Scrolls, HoMM, Ultima and so on.

So why do we prefer to roleplay in a fantasy environment? Some people have said that it’s easier to script a fantasy world than a sci-fi setting. That may be true for computer games but it makes no sense at all for pen and paper games where a live GM can interpret what’s going on. It’s not even genre conditioning, decent sci-fi movies and TV series massively outnumber their fantasy counterparts. Something within us prefers to play Gandalf over Obi-Wan, we like to explore Orc filled dungeons rather than sprawling megapolis’s or the galactic wilds.

 I think it’s a perception of freedom. We like to be able to break the laws of physics, we like to have a potential that is untrammelled by ‘real world’ constraints, in a fantasy universe we can believe that a humble warrior can become the equal to the Lich King whereas in a sci fi universe we expect that a direct hit from the Lichdroid’s plasma cannon will annihilate any one regardless of heroic status. Our future frontiers are grounded in reality, we can add toys and wonder to it but, ultimately, we want it to look and feel real. Our fantasy filters are much less demanding, we can accept that magic changes the rules and thus what we expect is not informed by what we know. We are artificially creating an environment in which we will prefer one made up setting over another based on lop-sided criteria of our own design.