#1. Client Stability

This one is the biggest, and the extent to which some MMOs have lacked stability (at least upon launch) truly astounds me. Please note that this is not referring to server availability – if there’s one thing I’ve come to not expect from MMOs, it’s for the servers to be up. No, this is referring to the basic execution stability of the game client running on my PC instead of crashing to the desktop, blue-screening, or otherwise locking up.

If your game client isn’t stable, you might as well just pack up your toys and go home. While it’s possible that there could be an exception to the rule, I can’t think of an MMO I’ve played recently where the client up and crashed more than once a month, tops. While restarting a client after a few hours to help speed up sluggish performance is generally okay, it shouldn’t just up and decide that it’s had enough for now and disappear… right as I’m pulling Mr. Uber Boss Mob.

It’s quite clear cut: every successful MMO out there has a very solid game client to work off of, and players expect it to start up, run, and keep running until they tell it they’re done. This is not the kind of thing you want to put off and say “we’ll optimize the memory usage at the end” – a tightly-designed client architecture is best created from the start. It’s far, far more easier to design with efficiency in mind than it is to try and carve efficiency out of a giant mass of tangled-up mechanisms later.

#2. Strong Social Tools

You’d think that it’d be too obvious to mention that games designed as “massively multiplayer” should have strong support for social activities. You would be wrong. Far, far too many MMOs launch (or even subsist past launch) with only the most bare-bones of social tools. If you don’t have support for at least the following in your MMO, you need to spend some more development time on your social features:

• Grouping (thankfully, I’ve never found an MMO that managed to miss this…)
• Friend list (…but sadly, I have found MMOs that managed to miss this)
• Ignore list
• Player organizations (any persistent group of players, e.g. guilds)
• Some form of player information lookup

While it’s certainly true that quite a large portion of MMO denizens tend to actually be loners most of the time, MMOs are still inherently social games – even the hardcore soloist often wants to chat with people they know while off in the middle of nowhere. Communities are what make MMOs thrive and without a way for those communities to connect in meaningful ways in-game, they tend to die off. Elements such as a friend/ignore list and a way to figure out “okay, what level class is the person who just whispered me” are things that players will simply expect your MMO to have, and for good reason.

Just because you have the bare-bones essentials doesn’t mean you should stop there, either. History has shown that gamers thrive on social foundations – just take a look at all of the various gaming networks, social media sites devoted to gaming, and even the multitudes of interface addons designed to make social management easier within games like WoW. Both in and out of game, social resources are multipliers for your player base.

#3. Clean & Consistent UI

Nothing screams “unfinished” more than sloppy user interface design – both in terms of the actual graphics and the functionality. It is not that hard to design a basic set of UI widgets that fit together artistically and don’t look like they were created with MS Paint. It’s also not that hard from a programmatic standpoint to create a common implementation for UI widgets so that the same set of widgets functions the same way whenever you see a given widget. No, the hard part is actually convincing everyone working on the UI to actually stick with that widget set (and hopefully some sort of cohesive design guidelines for the UI as a whole) in their creations.

Your players are going to see the side panel of a table in a dungeon maybe once every hour or so, tops. They’re going to see their action bars, menus, chat window, and inventory every few seconds. Guess which one deserves the most polish in the art department? UI textures should be clean, properly tweaked so that there aren’t artifacts or weird stretching (on all resolutions you plan to run your game in), and preferably approved by someone who has a good sense of aesthetics.

Actual UI widget functionality should be as close to the standards people have come to expect from UI widgets as possible – that means if the widget looks like something you could put in a web page via HTML or find in a typical program, it should function like the version you’d get in that web page or program. People use the web and random applications a lot and are used to how the various widgets they encounter on a daily basis are supposed to work. If you make it work differently (or leave something out that they expect it to do), they’re going to be confused at best and annoyed at worst. On a similar note, don’t just randomly invent new or different UI widgets just for the heck of it – your players would far prefer to see things they’re used to and know how to use than some newfangled graphical oddity that doesn’t give a clear indication of what it does.

When it comes to keyboard shortcuts… imitation is your friend. While it’s true that people don’t just want “another WoW clone”, that has far more to do with wanting different gameplay, storyline, and world aesthetic. When it comes to UI design, people like consistency. If a player is used to hitting their “B” key to open their Backpack in WoW, unless you have a really good reason, go ahead and make the inventory key in your game “B” too. Ditto for every other commonly used key – unless you have an actual reason for why to make a given key one thing or another… stick with the keys people will naturally tend to try based on their experiences in other games. (If your game has lock-on targeting and your Tab key doesn’t cycle through nearby targets in view, may god have mercy on your soul.)

Summary

These three items are some of the biggest ones I’ve noticed often tend to get overlooked by developers, often in a rush to get their game out the door. All three of them, however, are things that can really have a long-term impact on a game’s success, and thus should really be considered as an investment that pays off down the line. There are other things that gamers have come to expect from MMOs too, but many of them are smaller, more nagging issues that aren’t quite so much “make or break” as they are straws that can sometimes wind up breaking the camel’s back. I’ll talk more about the smaller expectations people have developed for MMOs in a future post.

The biggest issue I have with reviews is that they tend to lean heavily towards the individual experience of the reviewer. “Now hold on just a minute,” I hear you say – “isn’t that what a review is supposed to be in the first place? After all, that’s why there are multiple reviewers.” Sure, to a certain extent – but why, then, do we have professional reviewers in the first place? Why not just cruise a few hundred blog posts about a game a formulate an opinion from that? It seems that professional reviews are supposed to be more credible than a random blog post, and in that sense, it seems like they should be a little more informative about the game as a whole, rather than just one particular person’s experience.

How exactly might this be accomplished? After all, it’s not really feasible for a game review site to allocate lots of people to play a game and then collectively write a review of it – the economics just don’t work out. Therefore, we’re going to have to assume that a review is going to be written by one or occasionally two person(s). How then can we create reviews that go beyond just individual opinion to something that can, at least partially, provide an objective view of a game?

My suggestion would be to encourage reviewers to engage with a game’s community as a concrete part of the review process. No, I’m not saying that a reviewer should ask the community to write their review for them. Instead, what I’m suggesting is something along the lines of going to the community and stating “look, here’s my thoughts so far… what do you think I’ve missed?”

I think it’s important for this to happen before a review is published, because what I’ve found is that quite often, the amount of time a reviewer has to spend on a game really isn’t enough to discover the kinds of mechanics that add depth to a lot of games. Many games “grow on you” over time, as you discover exactly why X works in such and such a way, or why tactic Y always seemed overpowered (until you finally realized that it could be avoided fairly simply via Z). All of these things are the kind of stuff that the community for a game knows by heart, because they’ve been playing the game for ages – but someone who only has ~20 hours to spend on a game might not discover before it’s time to meet a writing deadline.

There are many reviewers that already do a more informal version of this (and IMO, all reviewers should at least attempt to interact with the community beyond just their immediate teammates a little bit, even without mentioning that they’re reviewing the game). But I still think that making it a bit more explicit might both a) streamline the process, in terms of getting responses to reviewer issues that can be useful to rounding out a review, and b) ensuring that those issues do get rounded out before a review is published, instead of getting a sideways mention in the comments on the review that tend to get flooded with love/hate rants and arguments. Because let’s face it, the majority of people don’t factor in the responses to a review in their judgments – the comments play an even smaller role than an individual review itself. Thus, the wider a perspective can be fit into the main review, the better for the reader population as a whole.

Oftentimes when describing the game, it’ll be referred to as an MMOFPS. Gaming sites like IGN, Massively, MMORPG.com, et cetera all tend to use the term here and there. This has lead to various people getting into giant drawn-0ut arguments over whether or not Global Agenda “is an MMO” (not to mention the fact that it’s third-person, not the First-Person Shooter that the latter part of the acronym would imply) and based on that, whether it can “justify a subscription fee”.

It’s honestly surprising sometimes how worked up people will get in arguing against the usage of the term, even when it’s mostly just given as a general description – and yet when it comes down to it, very few people will agree on what actually qualifies something to “be an MMO”.

The most common answer for the “defining characteristic(s)” of an MMO is that it has to support lots of players playing together. Yet where does this line get drawn? Even the most solidly accepted MMOs generally tend to break down (lag and/or crashes on both the server or client end) when more than a few hundred players are in the same vicinity. At the other end of the spectrum, it’s clear that single-player games are definitively not MMOs. So in this range between 1 and 1000 players in the same area, whereabouts does something become a “true MMO?” There doesn’t seem to be a strict definition here – in fact, it seems rather arbitrary – not to mention not reflective of the typical MMO scenario. Though I have to rely on back-of-a-napkin guesstimations, I’d say it’s likely that the average WoW player doesn’t have meaningful interactions with more than 50 people tops per play session. In fact, the only common exception I could think of to such would be the instanced PvP battlegrounds, which due to their nature bring players together temporarily.

Perhaps, then, number of players in the same area isn’t the defining characteristic of an MMO, and instead it’s all about having a persistent and open world. This leads us to another question, however: what exactly do you define as your “world” for such matters? The “traditional” MMO answer has always been zones – whether large or small (or called by other names, such as EVE’s star systems), worlds have always been divided up into areas. Why? Because in reality, the actions of a player tend to have very little influence beyond a certain limit; a character casting a spell on one side of the world means nothing to a different character on the other side. But what’s to say that one couldn’t think of the game world as being in another form, something more streamlined towards specific direct influences – such as individual battles? If those battles are part of a larger whole, is there really all that much difference, functionality-wise, between a larger set of smaller “zones” and a smaller set of larger zones?

The debate over exactly what qualifies a game as an MMO could continue, but when it all comes down to it, it really doesn’t matter. Some might argue that subscription fees are only justified for MMOs, but I’d have to call baloney on that – just as with any other product, the only rule for what is truly “justified” is what people are willing to pay. While some individuals might choose to draw an arbitrary line of only paying subscription fees for an “MMO” game, the real purpose of playing games in the first place is for enjoyment; if you get more and longer-lasting enjoyment out of a game you don’t consider an “MMO” than one you do, why would the former not be worthy of, at the very least, the same cost as the latter?

Suppose you had the option between living in a rented penthouse apartment or buying a house. If you would enjoy the house more than the apartment, and someone walked up to you and said “you can live in this house, but instead of buying it you’ll have to rent it for the same rate you would the apartment” – would you turn it down and take the apartment which you would enjoy less instead, simply because you were renting? Of course not – you’d be paying the same either way, so why choose the one you enjoy less?

The same reasoning applies to games. Why cling to a principle of never paying subscription fees for anything that can’t be rigidly defined as “an MMO” if, in fact, you find yourself enjoying a non-MMO game more than you would an MMO? Now, this isn’t to say that everyone will find a given game better than another – or even that most will. All I’m saying here is… weigh cost versus the actual enjoyment you get out of a game – not arbitrary principles. You’ll get a lot more fun out of your time in the end.

Mobility is a key aspect.

When I wrapped up the first part of this discussion, I had just mentioned the core issue with designing scalable PvP: finding some way to maintain a rough balance between technique and strategy regardless of the numbers of players involved in the conflict. Before I go any further, I’m going to admit that I don’t think there’s any perfect way to go about this – whenever you have a truly large number of players in a battle, the drive to “follow the crowd” can sometimes displace all reason and the resultant zerg is inevitable. Instead, the goal we should shoot for is to minimize these occurrences as much as we can. There are some design considerations that, if carefully considered in the process of creating a game, can heavily influence whether or not the resultant PvP system favors zergs or more interesting combat.

Any time you and 99 friends are charging into a group of 100 enemies, technique is pretty much going to go out the window. That much is obvious, and any attempts to design a technique-based game with the vision of giant armies colliding in close quarters are probably in vain. Rather than attempting to do the impossible, a different approach is far more likely to succeed: motivating players to split up. A number of games already do this to some extent – usually, the manner in which rewards are split from vanquished foes scales in such a way that the best rewards (on a per-kill basis) come from small-group battles. Unfortunately, such a measure tends to overlook the relative effort/reward ratio involved. Small group battles require a much larger investment of personal effort to achieve individual kills, while zerging tends to rake in a fairly significant number of kills overall with little personal investment, even if the share of the spoils is much smaller. Thus individual players often gravitate to the zerg if they feel that it’s a more consistent source of rewards.

It can be hard to make rewards for small fights attractive without at the same time encouraging abuse of the system. There are many examples from a variety of games with PvP-based rewards where players attempt to game the mechanic, trading kills to acquire the benefits at a much greater rate (and via a much simpler process) than was intended. The core reason for this is that the measures designed to convince players to split up are all reward-centric. They try to change players without changing the actual gameplay – only the rewards obtained from it. It follows logically then that the same players who are willing to be affected by these incentives are the ones that are most likely to abuse gameplay in order to obtain rewards.

Better would be to design reasons to split up into the underlying gameplay itself. Instead of having a major objective that everyone focuses on, decentralize the PvP objectives. Instead of having 3-4 objectives in a zone, have 10-20: the more objectives you have, the harder it is for a zerg to dominate them, and the more effective hit-and-run attacks become. Instead of having movement based completely on simple overland travel, which allows zergs to move just as fast as small groups, provide mobility advantages to players that are split up.

Perhaps your world has a teleport grid that links all of the battle objectives, but that grid has limited throughput: only a certain number of players can teleport into a given location each minute. This hinders the movement of zergs while allowing small groups to roam freely, thus discouraging large groups from chasing smaller ones while still allowing small groups to chase other small groups. Contrast this to the party speed buffs employed by some MMOs, which, while sometimes helping small organized groups evade less organized zergs, also allowed them to evade other small groups if they didn’t wish to fight. (In addition, there is no actual restriction against zergs using such speed buffs; it just isn’t as common due to the disorganization of a typical zerg.)

With such a system, you get a result that can function well regardless of the number of players active in the zone: with a small population, conflicts occur at a few of the nodes, with the quick-travel system allowing a small set of defenders to quickly arrive on the scene where another small set of attackers strikes. With a larger population, the same still occurs, but it’s now possible (an encouraged) for the attackers to strike at many nodes at once, and also possible (and required) for the defenders to allocate their forces to the defense of these nodes. The strategic element remains in both cases (in choosing where to engage) but the tactical element is also preserved (due to the soft limitations imposed by the quick-travel system, it’s much harder to get a large force into position to respond to the strike of a smaller attacking force before they disappear again). You also have the occasional strategic surprise when one group or the other decides to make the sacrifice of forgoing quick-travel to organize an attack in force on a particular point.

This is certainly not the only approach one might take to designing scalable PvP, but it is one that I think has merit. I’d be curious to see what other ideas people might have when it comes to PvP systems that can scale.

But is that really the end of the story? Or to go a step further, is that even where we should be looking for the story in the first place? Somehow or other, the gaming community as a whole seems to have gotten it into its heads that “more money” implies “better games” – yet recent trends in MMO success/failure seem to show not correlation whatsoever between those two items! After all, three of the largest-budget games to come out in the past couple of years have been those most highly under contention as “failures” (Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, and now Aion), and aside from the monolith of WoW, the most commonly referenced “success” is EVE, which started out as a very small-scale, low-budget game.

Why, then, are we so obsessed with subscriber numbers for games? Do subscriber numbers actually translate to more and higher-quality content? So far the empirical trends don’t seem to support this. Instead, it seems like the highest-quality games are the ones that have relied on the “if you build it, they will come” motto and just tried to make a good game (and in addition, a good community). The funny part? If you succeed in making a good game… the game is still good, regardless of other games on the market. Likewise, if you succeed in creating a good community for a game, that community is still good, even if it’s not 11 million players strong.

And thus I arrived at my realization about what I disliked about Syncaine’s argument: it’s too focused on subs, both from a business and a community standpoint. If a player from Darkfall is focused on Aion subs, instead of Darkfall gameplay, that makes me wonder if the gameplay of Darkfall can’t stand on its own either – regardless of how much I like or dislike Aion gameplay. I figure, if a game is truly good and well-designed, those who play it shouldn’t need to care about other games – they know that their own game can stand on its merits without having to resort to mud slinging… and they also have a good game to play.

Yet quite often, those ideas don’t get reused, but instead just wash away as games come and go. In an age where everyone always seems to be looking for innovation in game play and typically settling for less, it’s surprising how many existing good ideas aren’t harnessed to improve games. Thus, the rest of this entry is going to focus on highlighting a couple of the ideas from existing games that I’d really like to see reappear in future releases. I may mention others from time to time in future posts.

Independent Chat Servers

This particular idea comes from Anarchy Online. Most people are familiar with things like the Steam Overlay and Xfire In-Game, which allow instant messaging on those networks while playing games via overlays that show the program’s chat interface. But what if you could go one step farther, and instead communicate directly to people using the actual game chat channels? AO did just this by allowing open access to the chat server without the need to run the game client, allowing players to use programs like AORC to chat with their friends and guild members even when not in-game. The server simply treated your chat as “coming from” wherever the character were logged in as was last logged out at. You could log out in a city and then be able to chat with all the people there while not actually playing if you felt like it, in addition to talking in guild or trade channels.

In addition, Anarchy Online’s open chat server allowed another tool that became very popular among players: the chat bot. Chat bots could take commands via whispers or monitoring channels in the game, and provide services based on those commands to help out with things like trading, raid organization, or even role-playing. For those used to using DKP systems in games with PvE raiding, imagine never having to manually update a DKP site again – instead, the chat bot could be told to update it simply by linking the item to it in a whisper. Want to know what’s in the guild bank while far from a city? Just whisper the guild chat bot and ask it. Instead of manually using in-game mail to send reminders to groups of people, you could have the chat bot automatically ping them with a message the next time they log in instead. There are plenty of possibilities here.

As far as implementation goes, things usually tend to be fairly simple. Many MMOs already separate out the chat servers from the world servers, since the two tasks are usually somewhat independent of each other. Allowing connections to the chat server without a world connection in such a case isn’t as hard a task as it seems – it just means a few special cases to handle the fact that there’s no in-game avatar moving around, and viola, you open up a new world of possibilities.

Leveling Pacts

Many gamers (self included) prefer to play multiplayer games, well, with multiple players. Often times, there’s one or two people in particular that we specifically dedicate our time to playing with, leveling partners so to speak. Yet inevitably the fact that play schedules don’t always 100% match up (even between significant others) leads to situations in which some characters jump a bit ahead of others in experience/levels. This can also be compounded by experience distribution in many games that gives the higher level character a larger portion of the experience from kills – thus widening the gap even further.

City of Heroes/Villians had a novel way of dealing with this – it offered players the option while a new character was still at low level to enter into a leveling pact with another player’s character. Such a pact would result in all experience gained being equally distributed between the characters until the pact was dissolved, even if one of those characters wasn’t even online! It made trying to stay “in sync” with leveling partners literally foolproof. Obviously, this option isn’t for everyone – some people won’t want to feel like they’re pulling too much of the weight if their friends don’t play as much as they do. But for those who really just want to always be able to play with each other without accidentally getting ahead/falling behind, such a concept is perfect. It’d be nice to see more games with this option – potentially for even more than 2 characters.

Links can be stored in the Memo Pad.

Let’s start out with something good. Aion’s ability to link map locations is an amazing idea that works exceptionally well. Open the World Map, Ctrl+Right Click on a spot, and instantly you have a link to that location that you can share with others in chat. You can also copy links to the built-in memo pad window (Ctrl+Right Clicking on a link in the pad will copy it back to chat for quick and easy linking of popular spots). It’s very handy and has caught on rapidly with players. On the other hand, certain other portions of chat linking could use some improvement. You can link spell books and stigma stones, but you can’t link already-learned abilities from the Skills window – which means that if someone is curious what an ability is, you have to type out a description by hand instead of just giving them a link. Also, while items can be previewed on your character by Ctrl+Left Clicking them, the same cannot be done for links of items.

The built-in automatic bag sort button is quite handy – though it’s not possible to customize how it sorts, it’s not hard to adapt to its sorting order either. Less appealing about the bag system is the amount of screen space wasted by section headers and not-yet-unlocked storage slots – it’d be nice if there were an option to just combine all your inventory slots into one large bag and hide the headers; I doubt most people use them (but I’m sure there are some who do, so one wouldn’t want to remove them entirely).

Group frames can be moved, self and target frames cannot be moved.

Shifting from windows to status displays, why is it that the block of unit frames for group members can be dragged around the screen, but the unit frames for your own character and your current target are unable to be moved? Well, not entirely – you can choose whether you want the “HUD Top” or “HUD Bottom” UI layout, which switches whether your own unit frame is at the top-left or bottom-left; but aside from that it’s fixed in place. Your target unit frame can’t be modified at all. Obviously the capability to allow moving of unit frames is present, so why is it only applied to the group frame?

Why are there no alliance (for those not Aion players, read “raid”) unit frames at all? Even the alliance window itself won’t show you the current HP of other alliance members; the best you can get is a red name if the member in question is dead. Would it really be hard to expand the group unit frame model to allow other groups to be shown? I pity alliance (“raid”) leaders. (Followup 12 Oct. 2009: It’s been brought to my attention that you can actually pull sets of bars out to the screen by dragging them there from the alliance window, so this isn’t really an actual issue, but it would have been nice for it to be more obvious.)

The location of the action bars are fixed, but at least the Aion developers showed reasonably good judgment about the placement of the bars. It’d still be nice to be able to drag them around and/or scale them, though.

Unless moused-over, the background of the Aion chat window is always completely transparent.

My thoughts on the chat window itself remain the same as my post from months ago – why is it still impossible to keep the background from fading out? If there’s one thing that drives me nuts about Aion’s UI and makes me wish I could write mods for it, it’s this. It seriously begins to cause your eyes to water after a while. While we’re on the topic of chat, it’d also be nice if unrecognized slash commands displayed an error instead of being sent out as normal chat – can lead to embarrassment when mistyping a slash command.

Whoever though up the idea of flashing recently acquired quests in the HUD quest tracker and putting a check box there to allow you to make the tracking permanent, that was a good idea. Kudos. It’s a very natural usage pattern that works well, and I hope that other games imitate it in the future.

The Memo Pad is buried in a 2-layer menu.

For the last item here, a small but almost glaring item: why is there no way to bind a hot key (let alone a default one) for opening the in-game Memo Pad? Coupled with the location linking system, the Memo Pad is a very handy tool, yet there’s no simple way to open it – instead, it’s buried in 2 layers of cascading menus. I still use the Memo Pad all the time, but it’s onerous having to mouse down to the bottom of the screen, click the arrow button for the menu, mouse over Community, and then down to Memo Pad. It’d be so much nicer to have a key to press to toggle it open and shut, or failing that, at least a dedicated button (perhaps by the minimap?).

There are other small things here and there in the UI that I like or dislike, but I’ll probably hold off on discussing those for now – perhaps in a future post.

Image via Sirlin.net

When PvP in computer games was first introduced, I’d have to assume that participant scaling wasn’t even on the radar. After all, it’s a bit hard to envision a “zerg” in Pong. As games have grown in both complexity and scale, however, the problem of how to make PvP fun regardless of how many people are involved in it is a real and complicated one.

As it currently stands, most player combat systems in multiplayer games consist of two elements, which I’ll refer to as technique and strategy:

• “Technique” refers to technical skill: generally a quality of individual players or small groups, this category would include things like twitch aiming, bunny jumping, interrupting enemy actions, coordinating spikes on a target, and so on. FPS games tend to be heavy on technique.
• “Strategy” (in the context which I’m using for this article) refers to a wider view of the battle: where resources are relative to one another on the battlefield, elements of surprise, class compositions, and reinforcements are examples. Many MMORPGs currently focus on this aspect in battlefield-style PvP.

How does this play into PvP scaling? Each of these elements heavily favors its own particular scale of combat, if existing games are anything to judge by. Technique tends to lend itself to solo and small-group combat by its very nature – individual skill shines most when the number of individuals involved is low. As the number of participants involved in a battle grows, the strategic elements of the fight become more and more important until eventually they dominate the fight (the classic example being “victory through superior numbers,” also known as “zerging”).

The crux of the problem arises in this transition of combat elements along the scale spectrum: it’s hard to design a game that integrates both categories of combat elements in a cohesive and scalable manner. It’s even harder to make that game appeal to fans of both types.

Some games don’t even bother to try making encounters scale fluidly, and instead take the route of partitioning PvP into different areas, with each area having a set scale – MMOs such as WoW and WAR are examples of this strategy. WAR’s RvR and WoW’s Wintergrasp/AV aim heavily towards the strategic element, while the other instanced combat focuses on small-group PvP. This approach has the advantage of simplifying combat design for each of the areas, but it comes at the cost of a balancing nightmare – player abilities have to be considered in all of the possible contexts within which they might be employed.

Another even more popular approach is to simply not scale at all – most games simply pick a target scale and stick to it. This is the case with almost all non-MMO games currently on the market. While simple, this approach is rather limiting – you’d run into trouble if you wanted to play an L4D game with your entire 50-member EVE corp.

Thus we arrive at the real challenge: making games which allow battles to scale in size dynamically, while still maintaining as close to the same balance between technique and strategy with any number of participants. (Stay tuned, I’ll be continuing this discussion in a later article.)

If you don't know the origin of this image then you are definitely missing out.

Initially, it was enough to just have the powers that be dealing with miscreants – back in the days of MUDs, typically a few admins/arches or whatever the game masters of the particular server in question happened to call themselves.

As online games became more popular and evolved, so did methods to cheat in them. It became far harder to tell what was actually cheating, and what was just someone with really good aim. Thus, other solutions to the cheating problem were invented: “cheater detection” programs like Punk Buster came into vogue as a way of deterring attempted cheaters. Unfortunately, as anyone with experience will tell you, such programs are playing a cat-and-mouse game with the developers of cheats, and the game is one that they tend to be losing – after all, the cheat developers have the advantage of initiative: they force the anti-cheat programs to react to their new inventions.

One of the issues with cheat-prevention programs is that they’re forced to make a trade-off between intrusiveness and effectiveness – the less intrusive they are, generally, the easier they are for a cheat developer to bypass or work around in such a manner as to make their cheat undetectable by the program. While some companies like Valve have been moderately successful in balancing both factors with technologies like VAC, other anti-cheater solutions seem to have had less success – GameGuard is an (in)famous example of an anti-cheating solution that is often considered both overly intrusive and disappointingly ineffective, thus leading to many complaints about its usage in various games.

From my experience, though, the best solution avoids these problems entirely. Instead of trying to play the cat and mouse game, it takes the approach of a military general and wins the war before the battle is even fought. This is done through both smart client-server design decisions and intelligently-designed game mechanics. By making sure the client is only trusted with information that should be available to the player, and double-checking that what the client says the player is doing is really something they’re allowed to do, the potential for cheating is greatly diminished.

Likewise, avoiding mechanics that are well-suited to automation (which also tend to be those that players don’t find fun a lot of the time, imagine that!) can greatly reduce the desire for many players to cheat in the first place. One good example would be a comparison of the “aura twisting” mechanic from EQ, DAOC, WAR, and certain other games compared to always-on auras such as those of Aion’s Chanter class. It’s not really hard to understand why many players of the former set of games might resort to automation via an external program or keyboard macro to twist auras; the mechanic as a whole is rather mindless and boring. There’s no real good reason to have it as part of a game’s design, so why include it? Instead, simply allowing a player to select a set number of auras to have active (as Aion’s chant mechanic does) achieves the same overall effect as far as buffing other players goes, but without the finger-tiring mashing of keys that doesn’t actually contribute to interesting play.

Hopefully as time goes on, developers will put more and more effort into “designing out” cheating instead of simply trying to block it out after the fact via inherently limited means.

At a basic level, I can readily understand the basis for Frank’s statement – “competition drives innovation” is a tried-and-true observation when it comes to any productive enterprise. There’s definitely room for more than one MMO in the gaming market, and probably even room for a reasonable number of them. In a purely business sense, there’s actually probably room for quite a lot of smaller-scale MMO games – assuming they’re not trying to shoot for the multi-million subscriber numbers with AAA budgets (and even that can be viable on some level if you have giant MMO markets like Korea and China to work with).

My thoughts, however, went beyond the simple business sense – they drifted towards consideration of the social aspect of MMOs. MMOs are rather revolutionary in terms of the both the scale and type of human networking involved. With single-player or even standard multi-player games, there’s no real concrete commitment to a specific group of players – one week, you could play with friends, the next week with another, and the week after that some combination of parts of the previous two, and there’s be no issues whatsoever when it came to organizing things (aside from perhaps what pizza toppings to order).

Things are not so simple for MMOs. MMOs are about commitment. They’re pretty much the exact antithesis of the casual “come over to my place Saturday afternoon and we’ll play Mario Kart” get-together. Whether it be coordinating the selection of a server shard so that everyone can play together, trying to keep all the characters approximately equal in level so that no one is being held up by anyone else, or even just trying to convince everyone to play a particular faction, gaming groups for MMOs require a level of organization and commitment above and beyond anything found in the non-MMO gaming world.

So how does this tie into the number of MMOs on the market? On a basic level, each MMO is essentially a “shard” in one big “meta-MMO” – subjecting potential players to all of the same problems as an individual MMO’s shards would, except now in another layer that you have to make it through before you even care about the game-specific stuff. Before picking what game shard you want to play with your friends on, you have to get them to agree on what game you all want to play. Just like with shards, it’s hard to divide up your attention between more than one or two (three if you push it) at a time if you want to make any real progress – but again just like with shards, it’s quite possible to encounter friends you’d like to play with who are already playing numerous different MMOs.

As the number of MMOs on the market increases, the chances that your friends are going to be split between increasingly larger numbers of games can’t possibly do anything but rise. So while yes, more MMOs on the market certainly can’t be a bad thing as far as increasing the quality of each game’s play… I can’t help but wonder if there’s some point at which we should really say “okay, we have enough options now.”

Afterword

I don’t think this issue is entirely without hope. After all, there have been some fairly innovative approaches to the social problems created by shards in individual games already – one example being Guild Wars’ districts system, which allowed players the option to move seamlessly between shards at will and without restriction (at least after the regional districts were made accessible – and even before this the International Districts were quite popular). Perhaps an analogue of this could be applied at the multiple-game level, where one or more games could actually be linked together in such a manner that progress in one would provide progress in others as well, such that you could swap between various games as desired without falling behind in any. I’m sure there are many possibilities out there just waiting for the right person to think of them and the right developer to implement them – but we’ll just have to see, won’t we.