http://www.edge-online.co.uk/news_main.asp?news_id=3416

So VI stopped ebay sales b/c they didn't want player jealousy? Obviosuly, the man's cracked :-)

Discussion anyone?

Xilren

Archimedes
02/23/01 01:11 PM
[re: Xilrens Twin]
Before this I've always thought of Bartle as a pretty smart cookie, I may be forced to revise that opinion.

First off, he doesn't seem to recognize that there is no major game engine difference between Player Death from being PKd and Player Death from the environment (monsters/NPCs). Granted, the psychology of the two is very different, but he treats them as if the game engine treated them differently. As if the penalty/loss if your character gets PKd is greater than if your character dies from a monster, or even as if no one ever dies due to monsters.

Second, he refuses to recognize the problem that unlimited PKing brings to a game, as if PKing always adds fun to the experience.

Third, he acts as if random player gankage is somehow more meaningful than random monster hacking. Here's a clue: it's not.

He does have a good point when he argues that these games have to be more meaningful to retain players better, but saying that PvP is THE solution to the problem is just silly. PvP interests a small minority of the potential market for these games, and those not in that minority will be just as bored with meaningless PvP as they will with meaningless hack 'n' slash of any other kind. To make a game seem meaningful to players you have to put MEANING into the game. Whether that's by making PvP meaningful, by making PvE meaningful, or by any other method doesn't matter that much.

Xilrens Twin
02/23/01 02:51 PM
[re: Archimedes]
You know, after reading that article it just struck me that he seems to ignoring the3 other player types he's so famous for writing about.

Explorers, Acheiviers and Socializers need not only some PVP but a certain amount of random painful death in order not to get bored?!?

Perhaps he's suffered some kind of major head trauma....

Xilren

Bebblebrox
02/23/01 03:39 PM
[re: Xilrens Twin]
I dunno, I think you guys missed the point of the article.

He's not arguing about the game mechenics differences, he's totally arguing about the need for "PD" as he calls it for long-term game subscription retention. And from what I read, it sounds like he's arguing for more meaningful death, be it from PKs or from environment. Like he pointed out, being able to res right away with no penalities isn't really much of a deterent to the player.

While I agree that he doesn't address any of the problems associated with unrestrained PKing, I really don't think he needs to. He definately wasn't arguing that the whole game should be a PK haven, as evident through his liberal use of "badlands", referring to the area "outside" of no-kill zones. Rather, it appears to me that he was trying to drive home the point that larger risk=more appreciation of reward=longer retention.

And he's not really talking about random painful death. More, he's speculating that the best way he can think of to add the required layer of risk is through either perma death or high death penalty. Then he counters that point, stating that the obvious problem with this situation is that players won't be as eager to play a game where your char can perma die.

All in all, I found it a good read. I really didn't feel he was trying to argue a point as much as he was pointing out one of the largest issues game designers have to face: Higher death penalty/lower player base/higher retention vs. No penalty//larger player base/lower retention.

Ithaqua Loves ME!!!!

Xilrens Twin
02/23/01 05:38 PM
[re: Bebblebrox]
But that's just it, i disagree with his premise entirely. He seems to be saying that without Player Death (a meaningful death; one that hurts in term of items/stats/skills, or even permanant) brought about by other players, any game will not have long term viability, b/c "without that loss there is no game"?!? His entire article is couched in such vague generalities that it's practically boils down to this: he thinks player conflict is good b/c it gets people more involved, but it's also bad b/c it drives them away.

Lets not confuse long term stability with long term profitability here. Who really cares if your dedicated player base has been on for 10 years or more if there are only 1000 of them? Long term profitability is what is driving these MMORPG's and in that sense designing you game to appeal to the mass market is the only reasonable course of action. And based upon what the market has shown to this point, most of the players subscribed to one of the "Big 3" do not prefer non-consentual PVP. And one other thing, what kind of long term do you think these games should have? 2 years, 4? 10? If a game only lasts 4 years with 300,000 subscribers is that really less "successful" than a game that last 8 years with 50,000? If you were a development company, which model would you prefer?

He's stuck on the concepts that these game are simply pissing contests about who can get acheive the highest, and that these games need conflict so players can properly determine their worth. I love this next line...

(quote)Some degree of PKing is good: although players may rail against the very concept of it, unless they do actually get PKed on a regular basis they're not going to leave in droves(/quote)

Um, how exactly is the pking good for the victims? Especially if they truly lose something (be it money, gear, skills, exp). It's like he's saying "Trust me, it's good for you" to the childish playerbase who's unable to grasp such simple concepts like "vegtables taste bad but are good for you". PK is a neccessary evil for the good of the game? You may not like it now, but in 2 years it will seem really fun?

Sorry, i don't buy that premise at all.

My personally viewpoint is you could have just as successful, long term viable game with no direct PVP combat AT ALL if the game was designed to appeal to long term involvement. Look, there always has to be some cap on acheivement, and exploration, but not on socialization. Designing games that allow people to foster long term social bonds seems to be the only way to extend the life of your game beyond continually adding new content (And no, i don't consider hating Mr Azzmaster b/c he ganked you and stole your dog to be a social bond that would keep people in game). People will stay in a game they now loath as long as their friends are there; the same cannot be said if you replace friends with "hated enemies".

Forcing PK on people simply b/c you think it's in their long term best interests seems ludicrous, especially considering that these programs are purely for entertainment value in an increasingly competative industry. Making people do something they don't like seems like a good way to get them to sample your competition.

Give player more and more options for how THEY play the game, not how you want them to play it. Encourage positive social interaction by rewarding cooperation. Allow players to have a postive impact on the world around them. Lot's of options is good; forcing one play style is bad. :)

And most of the upcoming games seem to have come to the same conclusion: make PD optional. Let the player determine their own level of risk.

Seems to make sense to me.

Xilren

What exactly was he basing his idea that "no PD means high churn rates" on?

LumsOtherHalf
02/23/01 09:14 PM
[re: Xilrens Twin]
Good Grief.

Richard is a smart guy but he is so totally missing the boat. He is firmly stuck on win/lose and 'it's a game". People want WORLDS not games. You CAN'T win in a world - it's impossible - you can't win in ours either - everyone exits out pretty much the same way - dead.

Worlds can be win/win - no one has to lose so you can be superior. This is very anti-game mentality. That is the key difference that makes these more than just games.

Worlds can certainly have conflict - and you can even achieve goals - those are quite necessary, but those are personal for the most part. He's quite correct in there needs to be reasons for conflict but doesn't seem to get the PK rarely has a fictionally justifiable reason.

Worlds are more suited to play - with competition sprinkled throughout. Games are about competition. The very mention of the word game invokes an image of a winner and a loser. Play doesn't necessarily have to have a winner or loser - and is most enjoyable when everyone wins.

He seems to think folks are leaving EQ because they are bored. Well, if they are bored - it's not because they don't have a PK breathing down there back - it would be because EQ is setup with the game mentality with levels and a perceived end, and not quite enough has been done to make the world end deep enough. Although I haven't noticed any drop in number logging into EQ. People stay because of friendships in all the big 3, that is a constant. This is a good thing. Having things to do while socializing is a HUGE part of these - no matter what your Bartle classification of player is.

Take a look at the numbers on PvP and nonPvP servers in any of the big 3 and justify nonconsensual PvP to a shareholder - I dare ya, I double dog dare ya. Once SB is out - supposedly the holy grail to this type - I suspect everyone can shut down their PvP servers and get on doing what they really do best, which isn't PvP.

I don't begrudge people that enjoy this their fun, as long as they are segregated to people that share that particular amusement. What I will REFUSE to ever, ever EVER do again is pay for the opportunity to play the role of a victim in circumstances I have no choice in......period.

I am far from alone.

Damiano
02/23/01 09:15 PM
[re: Xilrens Twin]
Frankly, I thought that while he headed off into never-never-land for a good bit in the center there, he got back to where he needed to go at the end.

To start, I suppose I should state that I am a fan of limited perma-death, and a wide range of player-vs-player options, including some limited non-consensual opportunities. Actually, for me, the two concepts should be irrevocably tied together... a player that wishes to indulge in non-consensual-PvP should be required to give up their virtual immortality permanently to do so. That will separate the men from the boys quickly enough...

I also agree with _some_ of his analysis of the effect of perma-death on play. I don't do it often (because I don't play all that often), but I have on occasion used the insta-refresh of mana on death feature in EQ to my and my parties' advantage, for instance, particularly during the scavenger hunts. Death in EQ has all the significance of getting lost in the woods... irritating and infuriating, but hardly a major loss. And since they've designed their game in such a way that "death" is a more common occurrence for most PCs than bathing, it kinda loses it's ability to generate tension more quickly than might otherwise be case. Example: most players I've known/encountered admit they would get more upset about losing an item to ninja-looting than to being killed in a train. As one PC put it, "I'm killed nearly once per session, whether I am adventuring or not. What's so big about that?"

However, as I've written elsewhere before: it is not _death_ per se that creates enjoyable tension (aka drama)... it is the believable illusion of it's imminence in a realm of actual safety. An amusement park ride does not have to kill the occasional customer to generate tension... the same priniciples apply to death in the MMORPG, IMO.

Maintaining that illusion and the associated tension can be hell, however, even in PnP RPGs, where the GM has a wide range of tactics to use in vocalization, prop manipulation, word selection/phrasing, etc. to generate uncertainty in an overly comfortable group of players. In a game where every little nuance of a scenario is posted to a dozen web sites 30 seconds after release: not an easy task to generate tension.

As I've posted before, however, I believe games which implemented extended injuries with associated penalties and a meaningful unconsciousness state could start to regain some of that illusory tension that Mr. Bartle would like to see, without having to be uniformly draconian in their handling of player death.

That section where he equates "player (character) death" to "perma-death"... I'm _still_ trying to decide whether that is drug-induced lunacy or simply a statement of a perspective that I am totally ignorant of. Probably the latter, but...

As to whether PvP is more meaningful in some way than PvE: I think the guy is simply overreacting in response to the overreaction of the UO evacuees during the aZZr4p3r era. I do believe that PvP can play a role in a viable MMORPG... but it's neither the savior of the MMORPG experience nor an automatic pass to a virtual hell. It can be controlled by the very same mechanisms used to control it in real-life, of which "perma-death" is a vital part. IRL, serial killers shot to death resisting arrest generally aren't a problem thereafter. The same basic logic could apply to such players in an MMORPG, assuming you eliminate the viability of a "PvP God in 24 hours" book series...

Anyway, definitely an interesting article, if a bit strange. Thanks for pointing it out...

"There is no problem that cannot be made infinitely worse through the proper application of utter ignorance." - Me

Damiano, EQ Prexus etc...

Edited by Damiano on 02/23/01 09:19 PM.

Damiano
02/23/01 09:46 PM
[re: Xilrens Twin]
In reply to:

Look, there always has to be some cap on acheivement, and exploration, but not on socialization.

I don't disagree with your real point in this statement, but I thought I should add that I don't think there has to be a cap on achievement or exploration. Not a "hard" cap, at least. For achievement: the concept of diminishing returns, folks. Been used often and well in the past. As for exploration, all you need is a big enough canvas and the ability for players to impact it significantly, and exploration will never be capped. (See the real world for details.)

And frankly, socialization in these games is usually pretty lame. Most of the avatars/characters have a combined personality and history that couldn't fill a postage stamp in 10 point type, and even if you break fiction and talk about the person behind the character, sometimes it doesn't get much better. Your best bet is rude jokes and the occasional argument on tactics.

Perhaps if the PCs were actually allowed to develop a general history and background _before_ they were dumped naked onto the streets of their hometown with not a clue of who or where they are, who they have been, who they might know, what's going on around them... silly me. Back story? For a Player Character? That'd take all the _fun_ out of it...

I have to ask: have any of these designers ever actually played an honest-to-goodness face-to-face role-playing game? (I believe Raph has... can't remember for sure.) Have they ever GM'd even one session, let alone a campaign, or dozens of them? Run a tournament event, or better yet, a pick up game at a convention? And then, assuming the answer to all of the above is _no_: would you ask a person with no experience in accounting to design/write your bookkeeping software?

(Excuse my vitriol. It's been a long week.)

In reply to:

Give player more and more options for how THEY play the game, not how you want them to play it. Encourage positive social interaction by rewarding cooperation. Allow players to have a postive impact on the world around them. Lot's of options is good; forcing one play style is bad. :)

No major disagreement, especially on play options. The more, the better. BUT, that includes the ability to effectively _solo_. Forcing one play style is _bad_.

Another two cents (I'll soon be a pauper at this rate...)

Damiano, EQ Prexus etc...

Domasai
02/24/01 03:37 AM
[re: Xilrens Twin]
Um...no. Mr. Bartle, I suggest you actually do a bit more research before stepping into this. Personally I'm for a limited sort of perma-death, but I still can't agree with what he's saying.

BTW, a quick comment on some of these replies: UO, AC, and EQ aren't worlds. In fact, they're in no way worlds. In worlds, there are no balanced classes; no worrying whether one person has equal opportunity to kill the other.

If these were worlds, perma-death would be the norm and the classes wouldn't be balanced at all. Only in games do we strive for such illusions of fairness. These are, and will remain for quite some time, games.

What fighting a bear is like in UO: http://www.adcritic.com/content/john-west-red-salmon-bear-fight.html

Dids
02/24/01 04:22 AM
[re: LumsOtherHalf]
Spot on with your comments, LOH!

Let's take the article apart:

"When the first wave of massively multiplayer online games hit the open market, 'player killing' was allowed"

Huh? Even if we add M59 to UO, it's hardly a wave, hardly massive (the small community kept PKs at bay) and <30hp people were PK-.

"The Ultima Online approach was to rebalance the game so that PKs didn't have so much of an edge. The EverQuest approach was to remove player (character) death altogether. "

Huh? UO introduced, basically, a PVP switch, sorry area. You still die in EQ.

"The same people who initially complained bitterly about being killed in EQ are the same ones who are leaving now for other games because they're bored."

Huh? EQ was always PVP-, PVP+ was an afterthought.

"If you could reach higher levels in the badlands than out of them, for example, then that would do it; if you could increase your character's stats beyond those of stay-at-homes; if you could buy bigger houses, or get higher skills, or bake tastier pizzas "

IMX, the average person interested in baking pizzas is not going to be interested in kicking ass, and will be mightly pissed of if researching how to bake fluffier cakes, s/he gets 0wned by Mr PK.

"Major counter-intuitive fact: most players who complain don't actually leave."

Umm, anyone who spends more than 10 minutes on Whineplay, et al, will soon come to that conclusion.

"The flaw in this argument is that that although current players may not leave a game that has PD or PKing, new players might not even start it. "

Umm, his whole point seems to be "I know better". He admits PD/PK discourages new players, so why the hell have it? It's a bit like your mother telling you to eat your greens...

"Verant recently stopped eBay from selling characters from EQ on their service, [snip] It was because players complained bitterly that it gave an unfair advantage to a select few. "

Now he's totally lost the plot!

"So the designers of massively multiplayer games have a dilemma. Should they have no PD (and pay for it in long-term churn), have caps on functionally immortal characters (and attract fewer newbies), or have optional PD (and cross their fingers)?"

And his conclusion is, he doesn't have one. "Long-term churn" is a good thing (but actually makes little sense to me) if compared to "short-term churn". Surely he means "no long-term retention"? What is a "functionally immortal character" and how does it dissuade newbies?

Boogaleeboo
02/24/01 05:26 PM
[re: Dids]
I dont fit into ANY of the "Bartle types". am I going to die?

1.This is not a game. 2.Here and now,you are alive.

Richard Bartle
02/25/01 06:20 AM
[re: Xilrens Twin]
Hi, Lum people.

I thought I'd respond to a few of the comments that have appeared here concerning my Edge article. I apologise in advance for not tackling every issue in a thorough and comprehensive manner to the complete satisfaction of everyone, but there are more of you than there are of me and I can only type so fast...

Just by way of context, the Edge article was written at the invitation of the (online) magazine's editor, who's a former player of my MUD. I could have written about anything I wanted to, but provocative was better; the idea was to get people to read the magazine, after all... My aim was to cause people to think about online game design; whether they agree with me or not isn't strictly the point, so long as they advance their own thoughts on the matter. The more people who think about games objectively instead of simply going with the flow, the better. By questioning current paradigms, people can come up with new ideas; whether these are in line with or at right angles to the current crop of games, I'm not particularly bothered, so long as it moves things along. The worst thing that can happen to the nascent massively multiplayer online game industry is for it to stagnate.

I invariably have two problems when I try do this kind of thing: 1) people take what I say as an attack on their own particular game's way of doing things, and after much dialogue eventually conclude that their own game's way of doing it, while not perfect, is better than whatever I've suggested; 2) they argue about what they think I wrote instead of what I actually wrote. In the former case, well, there's not a lot I can do about it. I'm not arguing for change to existing games, which is why I'm particular to use generalities in my writing. If people are happy playing game X, well then of course they're going to be upset if some self-professed expert who doesn't play it comes along and tells them it's all screwed. If they want to say why a suggestion wouldn't work in their game, fair enough, but it's not like I was suggesting they alter their game anyway. If they couldn't accept their game the way it was, they wouldn't be playing it. In the latter case, I just have to live with it. Over the years, I've become used to people putting words in my mouth. I've had people attack what I've written without actually their ever having read it. There's also a "young gun" aspect to it, where people take a pot shot at the ol' time gunslinger because then they'll look good if they manage a deadly wound on him. Still, if it keeps me sharp!

OK, that's the end of my boring introduction, now for my boring comments...

Xilren>So VI stopped ebay sales b/c they didn't want player jealousy?

Then why did they stop it then, exactly?

Archimedes>First off, he doesn't seem to recognize that there is no major game engine difference between Player Death from being PKd and Player Death from the environment (monsters/NPCs).

Of course there isn't! I needed to say this?!

>Granted, the psychology of the two is very different, but he treats them as if the game engine treated them differently. As if the penalty/loss if your character gets PKd is greater than if your character dies from a monster

You were right in your assumption that I was talking about the psychological effects. People are less hurt if they die to a monster than if they die to a PK.

There are tweaks you can put into the game engine concerning PK deaths, of course - I wouldn't rule it out. One common early strategy in MUD development was to have the attacker lose everything if they were killed in a fight, but the defender lose only a slightly-more-than-token amount. This wasn't what I was talking about, though.

>Second, he refuses to recognize the problem that unlimited PKing brings to a game, as if PKing always adds fun to the experience.

No, no, no.

As I pointed out in my now ancient paper on player types, if you have a game with too much PKing (let alone unlimited), you pretty soon end up with a game that ONLY has PKing. Unless you're aiming for that, it's a Bad Thing.

PKing in itself doesn't add fun to the game except for PKers, who we don't really care about. In my article, I attempted to separate the notion of PD from that of PKing, because I feel that virtually all of the benefits of PK and are due to the PD involved and most of the particularly hated aspects of PK don't apply to PD.

Perhaps at this point I ought to mention that the article was edited by the people at Edge. It is not identical to the article I submitted to them, although on the whole it differs only in minor ways. One place where editing has made an impact, though, is the line which reads "Introducing player death helps, but it has to be 'real' death";, this originally read "Introducing player death helps; indeed, it may well be enough. It has to be "real" death, though". Had the original line stayed as written, this would perhaps have made my point of view clearer and not led to the impression that I was primarily advocating PKing. I was being pro-PD, rather than pro-PK.

>He does have a good point when he argues that these games have to be more meaningful to retain players better, but saying that PvP is THE solution to the problem is just silly.

I agree, it is, which is why I didn't say it. In fact, I mentioned the two solutions already employed: "a constant influx of newbies or the regular addition of new areas".

PvP is a solution, but it comes with problems of its own. PD helps, and may well be a solution, but it has to be done carefully and thoughtfully.

Xilren>Explorers, Acheiviers and Socializers need not only some PVP but a certain amount of random painful death in order not to get bored?!?

Socialisers and explorers don't need PvP. Achievers don't necessarily either (depending on how the rest of the game is constructed), but they need PD or something close to it. Without that, what are they achieving?

People who don't want to die (socialiers) don't have to go into the places where they're at risk of dying. They won't reach the top of the tree, but they're not into that anyway. True explorers don't care about PD one way or the other, except inasmuch as it's a tiresome inconvenience. Achievers need some concept of loss, however, because otherwise achievement isn't achievement, it's just progression.

There are other ways to do this, yes, of course. PD is only a valid concept in games which are built around combat - I wouldn't advocate it for a game where players tried to become pop stars or business tycoons. I'd advocate having some way for people to lose everything if they were prepared to take risks, though, and I'd advocate rewarding people who DID take risks commensurately.

Bebblebrox>Rather, it appears to me that he was trying to drive home the point that larger risk=more appreciation of reward=longer retention.

Yes, that's exactly what I was saying, only somewhat less coherently than your summary!

>I really didn't feel he was trying to argue a point as much as he was pointing out one of the largest issues game designers have to face: Higher death penalty/lower player base/higher retention vs. No penalty//larger player base/lower retention.

Correct. I had a motive, in that I wanted game designers (and players, although that hope was somewhat fainter) actually to think about the issues rather than considering mere mention of the subject taboo. There ARE ways to address PD and PKing other than switching them off or condemning them to their own servers. Whether there are other approaches that bring the same positive value to the game as PD without the associated negative ones, well, that was the question I was throwing open.

Xilren>He seems to be saying that without Player Death (a meaningful death; one that hurts in term of items/stats/skills, or even permanant) brought about by other players, any game will not have long term viability, b/c "without that loss there is no game"?!? It can have it by other means - turning a newbie hose on it, or constantly producing new add-ons - but those are expensive. If a gameplay way to have the same effect could be found, it ought to be considered.

>he thinks player conflict is good b/c it gets people more involved, but it's also bad b/c it drives them away.

Almost. It's good because it retains them, but in today's climate it's bad because they won't come in the first place if they know it's there.

>Who really cares if your dedicated player base has been on for 10 years or more if there are only 1000 of them?

Well, those 1000 do, obviously.

Perhaps a more pertinent question might be who cares if you have a game with 300,000 players when you could have had one with 600,000?

>based upon what the market has shown to this point, most of the players subscribed to one of the "Big 3" do not prefer non-consentual PVP.

They don't prefer it in the form any of the big 3 used. Suppose you were designing a passenger ship just after the invention of steam engines. You suspect your ship will go faster with a steam engine than with sails, so you install one. Unfortunately, because no-one ever fitted a steam engine to a passenger ship before, the engineers put it too close to the back and its weight lifts the front up and makes the boat unstable. Hundreds of passengers get seasick and refuse to travel on your ship again unless you put back the sails, so you do.

This isn't necessarily an argument for using sails instead of steam, though; it could be an argument for putting your steam engine further forward. The failure of PvP with the "big 3" isn't necessarily to do with non-PvP's inherent superiority over PvP; it could be an argument for doing PvP a different way.

>He's stuck on the concepts that these game are simply pissing contests about who can get acheive the highest

For achievers, that's precisely what they are.

Now you CAN take all the achievers out of a game, and still have a stable game full of socialisers. It won't have as many players as if you'd kept the achievers - it won't even have as many socialisers as it would have had if you'd kept the achievers. You'll still have a game, though (well, you'll still have a world; whether it's a "game" or not is debatable).

If you don't want achievers, fine, ignore my article. If you do, well, hopefully it'll have given you some food for thought.

>My personally viewpoint is you could have just as successful, long term viable game with no direct PVP combat AT ALL if the game was designed to appeal to long term involvement.

But there's the dilemma: at the moment, there doesn't seem to be any discussion of how to design a game which does that, other than using player death or pumping money in from the outside.

>Look, there always has to be some cap on acheivement, and exploration, but not on socialization.

Actually, there doesn't have to be a cap on achievement. One approach that could be worth pursuing is to allow players to get to whatever highest level they can, with no limit. It takes them longer and longer to reach the higher levels, but there's nothing except time and tedium to halt progression.

>Designing games that allow people to foster long term social bonds seems to be the only way to extend the life of your game beyond continually adding new content (And no, i don't consider hating Mr Azzmaster b/c he ganked you and stole your dog to be a social bond that would keep people in game).

The bonds you get from PD are the "friendship under fire" ones, not the "common enemy" ones. Those can last a lifetime.

>Give player more and more options for how THEY play the game, not how you want them to play it.

Actually, that IS how I want it. I want a game world which is so full of things to do and ways to do it that there's no need for camping, or story arcs, or player classes.

>And most of the upcoming games seem to have come to the same conclusion: make PD optional. Let the player determine their own level of risk.

Wasn't that pretty well what my article was advocating?

LumsOtherHalf>He is firmly stuck on win/lose and 'it's a game". People want WORLDS not games.

You're teaching your grandmother to suck eggs. I've been telling people they're places, not games, for years. In a recent design document for a massively multiplayer persistent world that I was working on, I insisted that every reference to its being a "game" be purged in favour of its being a "world".

But you have to look at the bigger picture. Most people DO want worlds, not games, but the worlds have to have meaning. Achievers, who want games not worlds, add that meaning - they add the plot. If you don't have achievers, you don't get so many socialisers. Therefore, if you want more socialisers, increasing the number of achievers is one way to do that.

>You CAN'T win in a world - it's impossible - you can't win in ours either - everyone exits out pretty much the same way - dead.

And yet these games worlds don't even have that! Characters don't even die of old age. That inevitably leads to a world top-heavy with powerful characters. It's only through the death of the people in power that the real world gets to change - it was only the death of dictators from World War 2 in the 80s that enabled so many changes in Eastern Europe, for example.

Would you play a game where you were told, in advance, that your character would die of old age after, say, 3 real-life years?

>People stay because of friendships in all the big 3, that is a constant.

Yes, indeed, as I've said many times before (mainly because I first identified this phenomenon).

>Take a look at the numbers on PvP and nonPvP servers in any of the big 3 and justify nonconsensual PvP to a shareholder - I dare ya, I double dog dare ya.

Well were I in a position to take you up on that, and were I actually advocating PvP rather than mere PD, I guess I'd say that it would be like taking an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and making two edits. One edit has all the violence removed, and the other edit has all the violence that was removed but none of the rest of it. On the whole, people don't like a lot of violence, but they miss it if it's not there in a context where it should be. The majority of people would watch the volence-free edit, but it wouldn't be as satisfying as the unexpurgated version that they're not allowed to watch. The people who actually like the violence for its own sake would watch the violent part and get pretty much nothing out of it. Now if the two parts were married back together in just the right mix, it can make both camps happy (although that isn't actually the point; the point is to make the majority part happier - the minority is such a minority that they're not even worth considering for a mainstream product).

Damiano>a player that wishes to indulge in non-consensual-PvP should be required to give up their virtual immortality permanently to do so.

Yes, I agree. I'd take that as axiomatic.

>it is not _death_ per se that creates enjoyable tension (aka drama)... it is the believable illusion of it's imminence in a realm of actual safety.

That's a very important point. It's the threat of death which is of primary importance, not actual death. You have to HAVE actual death, otherwise there's no threat, but if you can usually get away using your skill, and it's only by staying around to try to minimise your losses of other things (eg. kit) that gets you killed, then it won't happen very often. On the other hand, if you WANT your character to die, you really ought to be able to cause it to do so.

>That section where he equates "player (character) death" to "perma-death"... I'm _still_ trying to decide whether that is drug-induced lunacy or simply a statement of a perspective that I am totally ignorant of. Probably the latter, but...

The reason I said "player (character) death" was to make it clear I was talking about the death of the character, rather than the player sitting at the computer. It's called "player death", but that's something of a misnomer because the player doesn't die, the character they're playing dies. I also meant death in the sense of permanent, you're not going to get resurrected, this is it, wave bye bye, think of a new name and start over. This is sometimes called "permadeath".

Damiano>I have to ask: have any of these designers ever actually played an honest-to-goodness face-to-face role-playing game?

Yes, I played a lot of D&D in my teens (and yes, that was D&D, not AD&D - my teens were a LONG time ago!).

>Have they ever GM'd even one session, let alone a campaign, or dozens of them?

Yes, I've GMed many, many sessions and a campaign that we played every day across a long, hot summer. These were the days when people designed their own, too, rather than buying modules off a shelf.

>Run a tournament event

I don't believe I've done that unless you stretch your definition of what constitutes a "tournament".

>or better yet, a pick up game at a convention?

Yeah, done that. Flash an English accent at GenCon and you can open all sorts of doors .

Domasai>Um...no. Mr. Bartle, I suggest you actually do a bit more research before stepping into this.

If you're going to talk about research, you might at least do a little yourself: it's Dr Bartle, if you have to use the sword of feigned formality on me.

>BTW, a quick comment on some of these replies: UO, AC, and EQ aren't worlds. In fact, they're in no way worlds. In worlds, there are no balanced classes; no worrying whether one person has equal opportunity to kill the other.

They're not worlds like our world, and they're not worlds as I personally would design them, but they're still worlds in the general sense of being (virtual) places you can visit. They're worlds in the same sense that Disney World is a world.

OK, that's about it. Have fun tearing it apart!

Richard

Damiano
02/25/01 09:04 AM
[re: Richard Bartle]
I knew it was my own ignorance that was the problem.

My comments on designers and RPGing, take with a grain of salt. I know most of the vast majority of them have been heavily involved in RPG play from the beginning, and love the hobby even more than I do. It is just so frustrating to see these offerings constantly ignore tried and true techniques for encouraging actual roleplaying. Giving players a back story (or better yet, letting them develop it themselves) and a solid grounding in the setting prior to the start of the "campaign", to pick an example.

It was a bad day, and I had a headache... and very poor showmanship nonetheless. I sincerely apologize to anyone offended.

In reply to:

Xilren>So VI stopped ebay sales b/c they didn't want player jealousy?
Then why did they stop it then, exactly?

According to G. Zatkin at the USC conference, they stopped it because of their design. His explanation: the group-centric mechanisms in their design means that people become "trained" at playing their character over the course of the months spent developing it, and the challenges at those upper levels are tuned to require the maximum effort of a well-honed group. Allowing E-bay sales, according to him, not only hurts the buyer (who doesn't have the skills to effectively play the character), but also everyone he encounters (who cannot depend on that PC to fill his required role).

All the logic of which somewhat flies in the face of their semi-regular changes to high-level spells and tactics. If allowing _one_ player to be ineffective for a short period of time while they learn how to play the game is bad, isn't changing the effective tactics of an entire role in the game, and rendering _all_ such players equally inept while they blunder about redeveloping their tactics, infinitely worse?

In reply to:

Characters don't even die of old age. That inevitably leads to a world top-heavy with powerful characters. It's only through the death of the people in power that the real world gets to change - it was only the death of dictators from World War 2 in the 80s that enabled so many changes in Eastern Europe, for example. Would you play a game where you were told, in advance, that your character would die of old age after, say, 3 real-life years?

I would. In a heartbeat. Given certain other assumptions about the game, admittedly.

Oh, I agree with this so much it hurts. I've built it into my own "dream design" document, as a matter of fact, as a Lifespan value which can be affected not only by the raw passage of time, but by spell use (ala 1st Ed D&D Haste, for example) and undead attacks, as well as being part of the cost for certain "close calls"/death reversals. It also opens up opportunities for: seeking the philosopher's stone, fountains of youth, longevity potions, researching necromantic procedures for "side-stepping" death (lich/mummy), attaining sainthood in a "religion" to extend lifespan with the usual conditions, and a whole host of other historically potent plotlines and dramas that cannot exist meaningfully in the current mass market offerings. Even in the realm of sci-fi, there are certain powerful plots/themes with a longevity component (Niven's Pak Protectors, for less direct example): the quest for immortality could probably be considered a central theme of the human condition.

In reply to:

>That section where he equates "player (character) death" to "perma-death"... I'm _still_ trying to decide whether that is drug-induced lunacy or simply a statement of a perspective that I AM
totally ignorant of. Probably the latter, but...

The reason I said "player (character) death" was to make it clear I was talking about the death of the character, rather than the player sitting at the computer. It's called "player death", but that's something of a misnomer because the player doesn't die, the character they're playing dies. I also meant death in the sense of permanent, you're not going to get resurrected, this is it, wave bye bye, think of a new name and start over. This is sometimes called "permadeath".

I had no problem with the player/player character distinction. It was the automatic equivocation of PC death and permanent death that had my head twirling. You were, in essence, a step ahead of me.

I have to admit, it took me another two readings to make head or tails of that section of your article, even with your explanation. I think it was the way it lead directly in from the initial PvP discussion, and the fact that we are all usually so focussed on the latest MMOG stuff here that I, at least, often fail to back off and look from the wider perspective of MUDs to present. The first several times I read it, it appeared you were automatically equating PC death to permanent character loss, which as we know, is not the MMOG industry standard (quite the opposite, actually). It took a drastic change of perspective to realize that you were essentially saying that these games don't really have "death" at all, in any real sense... essentially, that their use of the term is a misnomer to begin with.

Or did I get it wrong, again?

In reply to:

>or better yet, a pick up game at a convention? Yeah, done that. Flash an English accent at GenCon and you can open all sorts of doors .

"Sorry, Craig. Everyone's going to play with some English gent over in the other hall, accent and all. Catch us after the tournament, okay?"

So it was YOU! Unfair! (Do you think a bad Monty Python impression with an "American Nordic" twang would work as well?... Probably not.)

On a more serious side note, though... some of the most enjoyable and challenging sessions I've ever run in my life have been at GenCon in the commons area. It's been -way- too long since I made it out there.

GenCon 2001 or Bust!

For my part... thanks for stopping in and clarifying your views, Dr. Bartle. Nobody is safe here, as you can probably tell, but at least everyone does get a fair turn in the role of whipping boy.

I do hope you'll come visit us more often...

"There is no problem that cannot be made infinitely worse through the proper application of utter ignorance." - Me

Damiano, EQ Prexus etc...

(Ed: removed a duplicate "here" and gave the man his deserved title.)

Edited by Damiano on 02/25/01 09:18 AM.

LumsOtherHalf
02/25/01 01:28 PM
[re: Richard Bartle]
Dr. Bartle....

I wish this had come thru clearer in your article - it did come across to most here as an advocate of the old free PKing system - perhaps most of us here are a bit overly sensitive to that having suffered from it's practical application in UO for too long - we know as a practical matter that allowing freewill in this regard doesn't quite hold up to theory. I didn't get into the perma death part as I can agree with the basic premise and necessity of it - I'll address that below.

>But you have to look at the bigger picture. Most people DO want worlds, not games, but the worlds have to have meaning. Achievers, who want games not worlds, add that meaning - they add the plot. If you don't have achievers, you don't get so many socialisers. Therefore, if you want more socialisers, increasing the number of achievers is one way to do that.

Well, achievers hmmm. The only type you have identified in your famous document about player types that I would not allow in a world of mine is a small subset of the killer group - known around here as the griefer. Not all killers are griefers by a longshot - and not even all griefers are killers, but if that avenue is open to them - that's usually the route they choose as they can cause the most destruction and disruption with the least amount of work.

But the motivation behind an achiever is much better served in a world than a game. Sure, some folks are always gonna think of these in terms of a game and look for their pellet in the way games historically have conditioned them to - but already folks are waking up. Achievers want to be known for something. I have a small streak of achiever in me - but I am content with personal fulfillment of goals. Most want to be for lack of a better word famous. The two things most important to an achiever are the challenges - and then the accolades, fame (or in some cases infamy) that results. If you relate the ideas of PKing and achievement together, what you get is very poor negative reinforcement. In world recognition of positive actions would serve everyone much better - achievers would get their pellet without the need to distress the population.

The other major area that can be looked at for achievers is mechanisms that allow a players REAL skills to shine thru their character. In FPSs - this translates to reflexes. In worlds - this translates to the proper use of craft skills which we have yet to see in these. Allowing tailors to truly DESIGN clothing. Allowing bards to really play their own music. Allowing craftsmen of all types to have as much flexibility as possible in the intangibles. Perhaps allow construction of housing via pieces. Personal creativity is a boat everyone has missed so far - I suspect in large part due to technical limitations, but I also suspect it's because developers don't appreciate the intangibles in a world - they are comfortable with tangibles of games.

One thing I think we have not seen nearly enough of in these is player education to potential. Folks come to these with the baggage of years of playing singleplayer or few player games. That sets them up with expectations and reactions that in many cases are not appropriate to the massive player environment. Not only do there need to be systems inworld to reinforce positive motivations that appeal to the different interest sets - there needs to be some effort on the developers part upfront - perhaps before they even get into the arena of the world to set the tone and expectations that the player will find. This is more important for brand new users than folks that have spent the last 3 years playing in one of these relatively new graphical MUDs, but even some of those haven't quite 'gotten it' yet.

>And yet these games worlds don't even have that! Characters don't even die of old age. That inevitably leads to a world top-heavy with powerful characters. It's only through the death of the people in power that the real world gets to change - it was only the death of dictators from World War 2 in the 80s that enabled so many changes in Eastern Europe, for example.
Would you play a game where you were told, in advance, that your character would die of old age after, say, 3 real-life years?

Ok, I'll address my ideas on permanent death here - I did not do so in my original post as at the core we are in agreement.

Meaning - how can ANYTHING have meaning if people are immortal? In short, it really can't - people are not equipped either thru experience or imagination to handle that. The one thing that is truly missing in these is some kind of meaningful timeframe.

The problem of duality haunts these and flys up to bite devs in the butt on a daily basis. How to make something affect the character without burdening the player. Since these are oftentimes played for years - no one wants the sense that they've devoted months or years to a project that will simply go up in smoke with nothing to show for it.

I wrote a rather lengthy article on how *I* would deal with this problem. Not only does this solve the meaningfully spending your time problem, it also addresses uberness, newbieness, economic problems, truly neverending longterm goals, and a way to really make a mark on the world.

I won't repost the whole thing here - but in a nutshell, it introduces time as a counter. People age - and they can also exchange aging (think of them as lifecredits - you only have so many) to compress tedious tasks. What this does is cost the character something (meaningful now that you only live so long) while NOT costing the player their REAL time. Along with this is the generational model whereby you only have one playable character at a time - but at the same time - you are having, educating, outfitting - children. Once your character dies (extremely rare - most in my model would retire in old age from diminishing abilities) one of the children you have spent time, money, resources on would take over. Not as advanced as their parent - but past that newbie stage that most longtime players dread if they decide they wanna start over again. If you have more than one child as a direct heir - once you are playing one of that set - the others go into a pool to be randomly chosen to replace NPCs of the world/area. At this point you really ARE having an impact and making your mark on the world. Your children inherit your reputation, likes, dislikes - I'd even let players script them to some point as to responses. The base unit of humanity is not country, religion or guild - it's family.

This provides neverending goals - you continue, you don't really lose the time you've invested, it allows a means to limit characters without artificial levels or skillcaps - there is only so much time. It also allows a totally natural way to make your mark on the planet/area.

Twinking that is seen in these is very much the natural player response to EXACTLY this problem - whether the player realizes it or not. They are providing their own goals in very much the same way.

Now - throw a layer on top of the generational model for politics or a judicial system - the weight you carry in a world or area takes on an entirely different tone. You really CAN make a difference thru positive means. Conflict is easy to supply thru direct confrontation - but it tends to be hollow, especially in a world full of immortals - you really don't have that much of an impact. By looking at humanity we have the answers, we can also tell the areas we have the luxury of clipping out. These worlds are enjoyable because we can make them and can tailor them as we see fit. I have never advocated trying to simulate OUR world - I have often advocated looking to our world to figure out what motivates people, what may be missing in todays society that people miss and are looking for an escape to find.

The Hanged Man
02/25/01 02:57 PM
[re: LumsOtherHalf]
It would be great if one of the crack Lum Staff would interview Dr Bartle. We would still tear what he says apart but its interesting to hear what he has to say just like Ralph or any of the other opinionated game theory eggheads .

Richard Bartle
02/25/01 04:00 PM
[re: Damiano]
Damiano>My comments on designers and RPGing, take with a grain of salt. I know most of the vast majority of them have been heavily involved in RPG play from the beginning, and love the hobby even more than I do.

Hmm, I don't know if I'd go THAT far (grin).

>It is just so frustrating to see these offerings constantly ignore tried and true techniques for encouraging actual roleplaying.

Things that work face to face don't always work in a computer-moderated context, of course, and there are aspects of smaller-scale RPGs that you can't have in massively mutliplayer ones (eg. you could run an "Indiana Jones" style scenario for your local group of gamers, but not for 300,000 gamers simultaneously - the real world couldn't handle 300,000 Indiana Joneses, let alone a virtual world that was exclusively populated by them!).

That said, yes, there are things that you can do to enhance the role-playing experience which everyone who has designed their own AD&D or Call of Cthulhu or whatevr campaign has thought about, but which don't get used in persistent worlds. Although such worlds tend to be broad, for example, they rarely have much depth, and they almost never have any cultural depth (eg. historical backstory). Sure, elves hate dwarfs, but WHY do they hate them? Pure racist snobbery, or some kind of "desecrating the earth by digging holes in it" spiritual/scientific objection, or because the dwarfs keep attacking elven territory in orer to expand their own lands, or what?

>Giving players a back story (or better yet, letting them develop it themselves) and a solid grounding in the setting prior to the start of the "campaign", to pick an example.

I'm a strong believer in open-endedness in online worlds, and therefore am not all that impressed by long story arcs. They do have some advantages in terms of retention of players (particularly, if anecdotal evidence is to believed, female players), however they're not great at attracting newbies. Overlapping storylines, soap-opera style, are a better bet in my view, although my ideal is for the storylines to develop as a result of player actions, rather than of those of the game's management.

>It was a bad day, and I had a headache... and very poor showmanship nonetheless. I sincerely apologize to anyone offended.

S'OK, you don't have to count me among those offended (grin).

>According to G. Zatkin at the USC conference, they stopped it because of their design. His explanation: the group-centric mechanisms in their design means that people become "trained" at playing their character over the course of the months spent developing it, and the challenges at those upper levels are tuned to require the maximum effort of a well-honed group. Allowing E-bay sales, according to him, not only hurts the buyer (who doesn't have the skills to effectively play the character), but also everyone he encounters (who cannot depend on that PC to fill his required role).

There are so many things wrong with this argument that its hard to see where to start attacking it. However, let's just assume for a moment that it's correct, and the game is so balanced, and people can't get to a high level ordinarily unless they are skilled to play at that level. That would mean that Verant couldn't possibly have any objection to anyone buying a character of a level LOWER than one they had already. Furthermore, if they took X months to get to level Y, then Verant itself would be happy to sell them a second level Y character for X months' subscription fees. If that's the case, why haven't they done it? I'm sure there'd be lots of takers.

>Oh, I agree with this so much it hurts. I've built it into my own "dream design" document, as a matter of fact, as a Lifespan value which can be affected not only by the raw passage of time, but by spell use (ala 1st Ed D&D Haste, for example) and undead attacks, as well as being part of the cost for certain "close calls"/death reversals.

I like the idea too, but how are you going to persuade people to play your game when they won't go anywhere near one where their character is GUARANTEED to DIE?

>The first several times I read it, it appeared you were automatically equating PC death to permanent character loss, which as we know, is not the MMOG industry standard (quite the opposite, actually).

Oh, yes, sorry, I see now what you mean. Although I was talking from the point of view of "death" in the context of absolute, lose your persona death, for most players of persistent world games the term means the watered-down "ouch, that smarts!" kind. Yes, that would make it a little confusing..!

>t took a drastic change of perspective to realize that you were essentially saying that these games don't really have "death" at all, in any real sense... essentially, that their use of the term is a misnomer to begin with.

Yes, that's indeed what I was saying. "You call THAT death? HA! Now this, THIS is death! Muahahaha!"

>(Do you think a bad Monty Python impression with an "American Nordic" twang would work as well?... Probably not.)

So long as you don't end up sounding like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. There isn't an English native alive who doesn't find that hilarious.

>or my part... thanks for stopping in and clarifying your views, Dr. Bartle.

Just call me Richard. Dr Bartle is for formal occasions, for sarcasm, or for getting hassled by in-flight attendents when someone in first class gets an upset stomach from having consumed too much alcohol...

Richard

Richard Bartle
02/25/01 04:04 PM
[re: LumsOtherHalf]
Lumsotherhalf>I wish this had come thru clearer in your article - it did come across to most here as an advocate of the old free PKing system

Well, that's probably my fault for being imprecise, and for writing so much that the editor of Edge had to chop it down a bit before publishing it.

>Not all killers are griefers by a longshot - and not even all griefers are killers, but if that avenue is open to them - that's usually the route they choose as they can cause the most destruction and disruption with the least amount of work. If it's open to them, at least it lets you identify them and watch their every move. It's a bit like the argument for retaining usenet groups like alt.sex.pedophilia - not having the groups wouldn't get rid of the people, and at least this way you get to see what they're up to.

In a game where PKing is a viable strategy for advancing levels, people will PK whether they're in it for the fun, the points, or to inflate their egos. The hard core PKers are the ones who would still play a game where if you did kill "dead dead" someone you attacked in a fight, you lost your own character too. Whether griefers would fit into that category or a general across-the-board set of attention-seekers is, I suppose, currently a matter of personal opinion.

>Achievers want to be known for something.

Well, yes, but I wouldn't necessarily say that this was their primary aim. They can decide to achieve at the level of goals they determine themselves rather than those proposed by the game, but they have to have some kind of absolute measure so they can gauge their success. If there were a "fame" property for characters, for example, then it's quite conceivable an achiever would aim to maximise this. If it were more subjective, though, with fame measured in human terms and not in the game world itself, they're probably not going to care about it a great deal.

>The two things most important to an achiever are the challenges - and then the accolades, fame (or in some cases infamy) that results.

They want challenges that they can overcome and tangible recognition that they have overcome them. They may be competitive with their peers in measurable ways, "I made level 43 yesterday, youhave some catching up to do", but they're nowhere near as desperate for attention as killers (in the classical 4 player types sense). Killers put their own fame/infamy ahead of everything else, because they measure themselves against other people - they (usually) have a need to show themselves to be superior in some way to others. Achievers, while happy to accept whatever kudos comes their way, don't live for it. For them, it's beating the world that matters, not beating its inhabitants.

>If you relate the ideas of PKing and achievement together, what you get is very poor negative reinforcement.

You generally do, but it doesn't have to be this way. In particular, if you could contrive some way to ensure that PKs never amounted to much no matter what they do, it would act as a positive reinforcement against PKing. Players would try it, find it was a losing strategy, and abandon it. It's an approach I've used for many years in my MUD, but it would be extremely hard to extend into a game with many times its number of players. PKs can't really hunt in packs in a medium sized MUD, but they can do it with ease on a 3,000-player server.

>The other major area that can be looked at for achievers is mechanisms that allow a players REAL skills to shine thru their character.

Again, this is where PD would help, if only people would play games where PD could occur...

>Allowing tailors to truly DESIGN clothing. Allowing bards to really play their own music. Allowing craftsmen of all types to have as much flexibility as possible in the intangibles.

Until about 3 months ago, I was working on a game where we did have this - well, an analogy to it - basically by implementing fashion. Objects were identified as being equivalences, and players would buy them. There was a curve defined for each object type which defined its fashion rating, based on how many people owned objects of that kind. For example, say the default fashionability rating of a skirt was 50. A bunch of people with high "cool" ratings start buying skirts where the length parameter was "ankle" instead of "knee". As more of them buy it, the skirt's fashionability rises, perhaps peaking when maybe 10% of skirt owners have ankle-length skirts. These characters would get an increase in their own "cool" rating. As more people buy the skirts, though, they become commonplace - or as fewer buy them, they stop being fashionable. In either case, the level drops back to the default of 50. In the meantime, people have been seeking the next fashion - maybe yellow skirts, or skirts with pleaats - and the process starts again.

This kind of approach could be adapted to handle any kind of creative act by players in a game. If your tailor character designs clothing that other characters like enough to buy, your reputation as a designer goes up and the NPCs will buy from you too. If your pots are hideously ugly, no-one will buy unless you drop the price.

The disadvantage to this is that it's open to abuse from mule characters' fixing the market. I'd hope that the players would organise a tailors' (or whatever) guild to combat this with a more powerful cartel of their own, but you can never be sure what they'll do...

>Folks come to these with the baggage of years of playing singleplayer or few player games. That sets them up with expectations and reactions that in many cases are not appropriate to the massive player environment.

While they think of them as "computer games", sold in "computer games shops", we'll always have that problem. At least products like UO, EQ and AC look like games - think how hard it is for text MUDs and their ilk to attract new players! They look worse than HTML!

>Meaning - how can ANYTHING have meaning if people are immortal? In short, it really can't - people are not equipped either thru experience or imagination to handle that. The one thing that is truly missing in these is some kind of meaningful timeframe.

No disagreement from me on that!

>no one wants the sense that they've devoted months or years to a project that will simply go up in smoke with nothing to show for it.

Everything tangible may go up in smoke, but the player's own knowledge doesn't. This is good for games which are rich and deep and depend on skill and a network of friends, but bad for games where skill isn't really a huge factor and high-level characters can't interact productively with low-level ones. Sadly, the way that most games are designed today and are being designed for tomorrow, the effect of actual player skill on the success of a character is much less than the effect of the character's stats are. It shouldn't be that way, but it's understandable when there are web sites giving away every speck of information about a game so people can find stuff out about it at their leisure.

>People age - and they can also exchange aging (think of them as lifecredits - you only have so many) to compress tedious tasks. What this does is cost the character something (meaningful now that you only live so long) while NOT costing the player their REAL time. Along with this is the generational model whereby you only have one playable character at a time - but at the same time - you are having, educating, outfitting - children.

Yes, I've come across this suggestion before. I like it, but your problem is persuading newbies to like it...

Richard

Boogaleeboo
02/25/01 08:30 PM
[re: Richard Bartle]
These past few threads,in addition to being informative,have shown me that spam kills.I make one comment about Bartle,and the next post he shows up.Um....Jesus has nice abs.

1.This is not a game. 2.Here and now,you are alive.

LumsOtherHalf
02/25/01 08:30 PM
[re: Richard Bartle]
>You generally do, but it doesn't have to be this way. In particular, if you could contrive some way to ensure that PKs never amounted to much no matter what they do, it would act as a positive reinforcement against PKing. Players would try it, find it was a losing strategy, and abandon it. It's an approach I've used for many years in my MUD, but it would be extremely hard to extend into a game with many times its number of players. PKs can't really hunt in packs in a medium sized MUD, but they can do it with ease on a 3,000-player server.

Well, we don't have to look any farther than the early days of UO to see this application of theory. That is exactly what happened there - little nudges taking away all the supposed advantages and adding punishments for this kind of behavior. What it resulted in was extremely upset users who felt disenfranchised. In short - the overwhelming concensus among that population was - if the game lets me - I shouldn't be punished for it. The gradual limitations were perhaps worse than if they had taken a hard stance immediately. My personal suggestion at the time of the original rep system - if you leave victimization in - the victimizer pays in permadeath upon his death. The theory that people would rise up and control the PK population simply don't work when the PK is back in business in 5 minutes - there is no sense of justice at all. But still - PKs cried - that's not fair - the game LET'S me - that's why the game can't let them expect in consensual modes. Once consensual - it's not PKing anymore, it's PvP which can be extremely beneficial and enjoyable.

>Until about 3 months ago, I was working on a game where we did have this - well, an analogy to it - basically by implementing fashion. Objects were identified as being equivalences, and players would buy them. There was a curve defined for each object type which defined its fashion rating, based on how many people owned objects of that kind. For example, say the default fashionability rating of a skirt was 50. A bunch of people with high "cool" ratings start buying skirts where the length parameter was "ankle" instead of "knee". As more of them buy it, the skirt's fashionability rises, perhaps peaking when maybe 10% of skirt owners have ankle-length skirts. These characters would get an increase in their own "cool" rating. As more people buy the skirts, though, they become commonplace - or as fewer buy them, they stop being fashionable. In either case, the level drops back to the default of 50. In the meantime, people have been seeking the next fashion - maybe yellow skirts, or skirts with pleaats - and the process starts again.

Hehe, this sounds interesting - but this is also a perfect example of tangible vs. intangible. While it certainly couldn't hurt to have this for those that feel they need something within the gameworld to give them milestones of success - to truly give tailors creative powers would be much more satisfying for both the tailor - and the customer - than game mechanics - this is intangible, can't easily be measured. Would I care if my cool score was high? Probably not - what I would care about is someone seeking me out because they saw someone in an outfit I designed - liked it - and wanted ME to use MY taste to design one for them. That's not something you can really measure directly.

In my tailoring system - game mechanics might limit what patterns you had access to and possibly supplies based on skill - but how you assembled the pieces would be up to the players real skill and taste. By using pieces and allowing various colors, transparencies, textures etc - you can have nearly an infinite variety. That's the way sewing really works - I can take this bodice - with those sleeves, with this collar and create something totally unique - or at least different than where those 3 pattern pieces came from. The barbie doll factor is alive and well in these - and is every bit as observable among male players as female players. Another gameplay tangible would be to add attributes to components - but I've seen MANY people give up supposed gameplay benefits in favor of a look they prefer. The barbie doll syndrome has been majorly underestimated so far in what we have. From the buyers point of view - being able to look unique also ties into world impact. Granted - it's a small impact, but looking and feeling unique is the first step to both immersion and the sense you are really there. For the same reason people like to decorate their homes in UO - people want their avatars to be as unique as they can possibly make them.

>The disadvantage to this is that it's open to abuse from mule characters' fixing the market. I'd hope that the players would organise a tailors' (or whatever) guild to combat this with a more powerful cartel of their own, but you can never be sure what they'll do...

Well, that's why I favor one playable character at a time. Folks can and will go buy multiple accounts - that is not something I'd be overly concerned with. If someone feels they want 4 accounts, more power to them - since you can only really spend any time on one at a time, they are reaping the benefits directly in proportion to the support they are giving the enterprise.

>Yes, I've come across this suggestion before. I like it, but your problem is persuading newbies to like it...

Well, it has to be presented in a way to make them realize this is not something being taken away - but something added, namely long term goals and depth to the world. Since this is also pretty much the way the world works - it's also extremely intutitive. Although character building will always be a part of these - the focus really needs to swing away from that as a PRIMARY goal. UO proved that although some will complain if you move the milestones (i.e., make things eaiser than some think they should be) life goes on - that what would be the end in a levelbased outlook is only the beginning if the focus is on living in the world. You are absolutely correct in the player doesn't lose knowledge - which is another reason not to make them go thru that newbie stage more than once. Using the generational approach - your focus is on more than just yourself - to impact the world to the greatest extent - you also need to be worried about your children, their education, your reputation - for your posterity thru them. Once you have to be worried about others you also instantly have reasons to pursue goals as well as protect them (should things of that nature be allowed). I firmly believe once the checks and balances of all this is ironed out - this is the model that will come to be used in one form or another.

You touched briefly on what female gamers may want out of these - I've written extensively on that very subject purely thru my own experiences - and thru observation. What I've observed is that the list of wants isn't all that different in the male and female player - but that the order of priority of them tends to be a tad different.

Intangibles will rank higher on the females list than the males. Doesn't mean the male player doesn't like them - just that in order of importance, they are further down their list. Females will absolutely be more concerned with the reasons and purpose behind things than their male counterparts. Females will also be far less tolerant of violence towards their avatar that has no fictional rational whatsoever. That said - if she is inclined to revenge - no male can hold a candle to the lengths a female is willing to go to exact it. Most however will not seek revenge - they are much more likely to simply extract themselves from the world so as not to be subjected to that kind of abuse. Socialization also tends to be a bit higher on the females priority list than a males and these worlds are absolutely perfect for that - as long as they are not driven out.

Dan Homerick
02/25/01 11:38 PM
[re: Xilrens Twin]
In regards to player-death in general, I think it's worthwhile to point out that the mechanism used for it in games like Diablo II (hardcore) only represents one rather simplistic, extreme style of implementation. When reading Bartle's article, many people -- I'd go so far as to say most people -- don't think beyond the well-known Diablo style. Pity, really, because the "One Strike, Yer Out" system is so drastically different than what would be appropriate for the current crop of games.

When the reader so flat out disagrees with an article that they simply rant and rave in response -- not much gets done. Too much confrontation, too big of a jump for them to swallow, it just leads to them tuning out, rather than listening in and being convinced.

I've got to wonder just how much more effective the article would have been had it taken the time to establish that Perma-Death could be composed of something as low-impact as a "Nine Lives" system, or a "Non-Guaranteed Resurrection" system where the player has only a 1% chance of becoming perma-dead. Both of these low-impact versions still present (admittedly lowered) levels of the tension and achievement that he was talking about, but without forcing the reader to make such an abrupt shift in their concept of how the game would play out.

By ensuring that the reader only has to follow you through a small change in their gameplay, it leaves them more willing to follow you across what is a fairly large conceptual leap. Once you've got them conceptually in the land of permadeath, you can then, at some later point, tighten it down and aim for whatever level of extremity of it you choose.

Or is this sort of badgering about the style of the writing and about the techniques used not appropriate? am I supposed to be responding to his actual ideas?

Oh yeah. It wasn't a think piece. He wasn't actually saying anything new. He was just trying, rather clumsily, to change people's minds.

- Faerlyt

Domasai
02/26/01 01:53 AM
[re: Richard Bartle]
{Domasai>Um...no. Mr. Bartle, I suggest you actually do a bit more research before stepping into this.}

If you're going to talk about research, you might at least do a little yourself: it's Dr Bartle, if you have to use the sword of feigned formality on me.

Apologies for using the incorrect moniker; I'll see to it that I use the appropriate one from now on. As for 'feigned formality'...Sorry if you took it that way, but it was in no way fake. My remarks may've been biting (even inaccurate), but that's the nature of posting on LtM's boards.

{BTW, a quick comment on some of these replies: UO, AC, and EQ aren't worlds. In fact, they're in no way worlds. In worlds, there are no balanced classes; no worrying whether one person has equal opportunity to kill the other.}

They're not worlds like our world, and they're not worlds as I personally would design them, but they're still worlds in the general sense of being (virtual) places you can visit. They're worlds in the same sense that Disney World is a world.

True, but then we're using the word 'world' in different ways. In Disney World, 'world' is referring to a realm of social activity; it's to imply a place where people can indulge in the collected fantasies and creations of Disney.

In your other way of using it, as in '(virtual) places you can visit,' wouldn't it be a bit too broad a definition? I mean, wouldn't this also make a chat room a 'world'? Under your two definitions, yes, the present crop of MMOGs would count as worlds.

When I commented before, I used bad judgment and I apologize. I won't excuse my behavior any more than I'll defend it. I've admired a lot of your work, and on that alone, I should've shown the proper respect. It just didn't occur to me to use 'Dr.' or to amend my comments to be less aggressive than I'm accustomed to writing on these boards.

As for your philosophy: I'm with you there. I don't want this industry to be repetitive. If that was the intent of your article, then I'm glad you wrote it (even if I don't agree with you on a number of issues).

Fighting a bear in UO: http://www.adcritic.com/content/john-west-red-salmon-bear-fight.html

Richard Bartle
02/26/01 03:58 AM
[re: Boogaleeboo]
Boogaleeboo>These past few threads,in addition to being informative,have shown me that spam kills.I make one comment about Bartle,and the next post he shows up.Um....Jesus has nice abs.

I think the phrase you're looking for is "speak of the devil...". (grin)

Richard

Richard Bartle
02/26/01 05:55 AM
[re: Domasai]
This is another bulk assortment of replies to points raised in various postings.

Lumsotherhalf>Well, we don't have to look any farther than the early days of UO to see this application of theory.

Well, to see one application of it.

>In short - the overwhelming concensus among that population was - if the game lets me - I shouldn't be punished for it.

So this overwhelming consensus is presumably also fully behind people exploiting bugs they find in the code?

Golf lets you hit balls into bunkers and lakes, but do you hear golfer complaining of being punished for it? TV remote controls let you switch channels at critical moments during movies, but do people moan that the manufacturers ought to figure out a way to stop people doing it? My computer lets me delete files irrevocably when I empty the recycle bin, but do I blame Microsoft when I lose something that way I didn't want to?

By definition, anything that players can do in the game, it "lets them" do. Therefore, also by definition, what they want is for there to be NO punishment in the game at all. Every time you fight a mobile, you should win without a scratch - after all, any damage would be "punishment". What kind of game would that be? It wouldn't have any lows, only highs - yet highs without lows are worthless.

OF COURSE players are going to say "if the game lets me, I shouldn't be punished". There aren't many people who would willingly agree to let people punish them for doing anything, given the option!

>The gradual limitations were perhaps worse than if they had taken a hard stance immediately.

Yes, I agree. However, UO was the first major game with this kind of issue, and the designers had no past examples to work with. Getting it exactly right from the very start was next to impossible. I think they did rather well, given the circumstances.

>The theory that people would rise up and control the PK population simply don't work when the PK is back in business in 5 minutes

That's right. If people have to invest a lot of time and effort to get a character to the stage where it can take on another character in a fight and they won't simply be able to run away, it means a) they can't take up PKing on a whim, and b) they don't attack anywhere near as often as they're frightened of dying themselves. Unfortunately, with games that have masses of players, these points aren't always valid: you can get hordes of organised throwaway PKs banding together to take on someone much higher level.

>PKs cried - that's not fair - the game LET'S me

Well a real-life lavatory lets people stick their heads down it and flush, but not many people do...

>Hehe, this sounds interesting - but this is also a perfect example of tangible vs. intangible.

It was a way to move the intangible into the realms of the tangible. Not ideal, but at least it gave people a sense that their creative skills were being judged by other people, not by a computer.

>Would I care if my cool score was high? Probably not

You wouldn't necessarily complain, though (grin).

>what I would care about is someone seeking me out because they saw someone in an outfit I designed - liked it - and wanted ME to use MY taste to design one for them. That's not something you can really measure directly.

I agree. The "coolness" factor is basically just a way to rate a label, as in real life where people may go and buy a Paul Smith outfit not because they themselves think he's a great designer but because people who are educated in such matters think he is. Being a name just means you get to sell more objects, which lets you make more, and be able to experiment more because you can take the loss if your collection fails. Selling one-off, individual items is rewarding at a personal level, but can be frustrating if no-one buys because they don't know who you are.

>Another gameplay tangible would be to add attributes to components - but I've seen MANY people give up supposed gameplay benefits in favor of a look they prefer.

That's because most people are socialisers. Achievers would play a naked hideous character of the opposite sex if they felt the gameplay advantages were sufficient.

>looking and feeling unique is the first step to both immersion and the sense you are really there.

That's an interesting point of view I haven't come across before. I'll have to give it some thought.

Great thought it is for tailors, it doesn't really help bakers or weaponsmiths, though.

>Well, that's why I favor one playable character at a time.

Me too, but it's impossible to police.

>Well, it has to be presented in a way to make them realize this is not something being taken away - but something added, namely long term goals and depth to the world.

This, as you will have noticed by the response to my article, is not exactly easy...

>What I've observed is that the list of wants isn't all that different in the male and female player - but that the order of priority of them tends to be a tad different.

There are also particular common sub-categories of male and female behaviour that I've noticed in games over the years. No way am I ever going to write about them, though!

Faerlyt>Pity, really, because the "One Strike, Yer Out" system is so drastically different than what would be appropriate for the current crop of games.

The current crop of games are pretty well inviolate. It's the next-but-one crop of games where we might see some innovation in this area.

>I've got to wonder just how much more effective the article would have been had it taken the time to establish that Perma-Death could be composed of something as low-impact as a "Nine Lives" system, or a "Non-Guaranteed Resurrection" system where the player has only a 1% chance of becoming perma-dead.

I didn't have that degree of freedom. As it was, I went several hundred words over the number allowed, and the article was cut as a result.

>Or is this sort of badgering about the style of the writing and about the techniques used not appropriate? Am I supposed to be responding to his actual ideas?

You were supposed to read the article and be set thinking. Whether that thinking was cogent, coherent and imaginative or not is another matter, of course. I was trying to provoke thought; if debate came too, so much the better.

>Oh yeah. It wasn't a think piece. He wasn't actually saying anything new. He was just trying, rather clumsily, to change people's minds.

I'm sorry you think that, but I guess I should be pleased that at least you did think!

Domasai>As for 'feigned formality'...Sorry if you took it that way, but it was in no way fake.

OK, apologies accepted. There's usually a reason for people to be formal to me in a posting, and it's normally either because they hold me in unnecessary awe or want to imply I'm some kind of pompous ass. I figured it wasn't the former (grin) so it was probably the latter. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

>My remarks may've been biting (even inaccurate), but that's the nature of posting on LtM's boards.

Oh, I'm sure there's far worse being said on other boards I don't even know about!

>In your other way of using it, as in '(virtual) places you can visit,' wouldn't it be a bit too broad a definition?

It would, yes, but I wasn't attempting to give a full dictionary definition.

>I mean, wouldn't this also make a chat room a 'world'?

Chat rooms ARE worlds, just not very big or deep ones.

I concede that there probably should be a difference in terminology between worlds that have self-sustaining environments that continue to change even if there's no-one in them and worlds that don't, but for the moment we don't have that degree of fidelity in the terms available to us.

>It just didn't occur to me to use 'Dr.' or to amend my comments to be less aggressive than I'm accustomed to writing on these boards.

Well, posting in a public forum is opening yourself up to attack, so it's understandable for people to come out fighting in the first place. Posters here come from a variety of games, which means they don't tend to reinforce their own personal prejudices in terms of what makes a "good" game or not, and therefore the discussion is more open than on boards devoted to individual virtual worlds. There's some aggressive language, but that's pretty well the house style for the entire site, so it's not out of place.

I'm not going anywhere near game-specific forums, though. That way lie Savage Beasts. Last time I entered one it took me 3 weeks to extracate myself.

Richard

Archimedes
02/26/01 10:52 AM
[re: Richard Bartle]
Well, thanks for clearing up what you meant by that article, Richard. It didn't seem much like your previous writings, probably because of the imposed word limit. Nevertheless, I think you could have made much clearer what you actually intended to say. Oh well.

I wanted to make it clear because of some previous comments in this thread that neither I nor, apparently, most of the other people who objected to the article, had any problems with the basic concept of permadeath. It might be tricky to get Joe Gamer to accept, but most of the folks posting here seem willing to give it a shot under the right circumstances. Note that one of the changes that MUST be made before permadeath is viable is that it can't result from frequent problems external to the game. These include massive lag, lost connections, and similar internet related issues.

I agree with the idea that player justice is a laughable concept as long as PKs are able to recover quickly from anything another player can do to them. I'm not sure, though, that player justice was ever a good concept to begin with. I mean, as an outlet for consensual PvP it's not really "justice" at all, and as a means of penalizing non-consensual PvP you have the problem that you are asking people to act as policemen during the time they expect to be playing a fun game.

One alternative is to make the game system itself punish or prevent PKing. I'm still not sure here, but the article seems to be saying that PK switches are bad because they take away excitement from the game. While I don't agree with this premise (I think it makes the game less fun for a small subset of gamers, but most gamers aren't all that into PvP anyways, and wouldn't miss it if it were gone) there are many other in game ways of making life difficult for PKs that haven't been tried yet. Aside from the obvious possibility of diminishing rewards for PKing and/or diminishing the penalties for being PKd there is also the possibility of having the game engine tracking down the PKs and making their characters' lives a living hell. Call this a Non-player justice system. UO tracks PKs, and prevents those characters from entering most towns, but this is a relatively easy penalty to get around. The game engine could be set up to cause guards to gradually home in on the murderer and either jail him (taking the character out of the game for a set period of time), or kill him. Obviously death in these games doesn't mean much as thing stand now, but if NPCs track murderers down relativekly quickly the murderers may find they can't do anything except resurrect and try to outrun the guards again, much like their victims had to do previously. Another possibility is levying fines upon PKs. If you have in game property outside the character inventory (bank boxes, appartments, houses) these can be taken away. I also think that the current trend in some games to make PKing difficult or impossible with a starting character, but to make other aspects of the game achievable with said character is also a good way to go.

Personally, I think that if a game could be designed where permadeath occurred but was rare, and mostly avoidable by the player's actions, that it could add a lot more meaning to the game in other ways than just PK-prevention. I think a large reason people see these games as games rather than world is because of the association with video-games where a character has N lives. I think the PnP RPG model of death (where resurrection, if possible, is usually difficult, time consuming, and costly) will encourage a very different mindset.

Xilrens Twin
02/26/01 01:40 PM
[re: Richard Bartle]
Geez, leave for the weekend and you never know who might drop by. Next time ill pick up the place a little first...

Nice to see you here; sorry if I came across badly but my initial reaction to that article was something along the lines of "WTF was he thinking!!". Having read it a few more times and you replies makes thing much clearer. Anyway, couple of points...

I actually think there are quite a few people who would like a ORPG type game with permanent death from a role playing perspective, but right now I don't think it very feasible for any type of mass market game. My generally problem with the concept in such a setting is simply that it seems to run counter to the idea that these games you are "building" your character. If your character is truly getting better/stronger/richer/more skilled through your daily investment of time into them, losing all that due to random chance (be it connection loss, server crash, bad random number roll in combat, or killed by a player whome you don't know) is very lacking in appeal.

It almost every game type deemed an RPG I can think of (be it computer or paper), their is MEASURABLE character growth be it levels, skill numbers, stats, status points, vassals, houses owned, gold banked, monsters slain whatever. (There is also the non-mesurable things like pride in accomplishments, friendships fostered reputattion garnered and the like). In many ways that is how the acheivers keep score. To accomplish that growth requires the investment of time, if nothing else, and it is that perceived waste of time which bothers so many people when it comes to permadeath. That time spent with the same avatar tends to form bonds of attachement which I think help the intellectual transition of viewing the virtual space as a world and not just a game. Persistance and all that. So in some ways I think the concept of permadeath is also a hindrence to crossing that boundy.

The only way I can think of that permadeath wouldn't hurt that much is if the game either has a very short vertical growth potential, if their is a process which allows new characters to "jump up" the growth ladder (inheritance and the like), or if the game relies more on player skill than character skills. Such a game would be very different than the old journey from newbie to demigod most crpg players are familiar with and expecting.

One last thought, if your game system has permadeath for characters, and in order to compensate for that you have some sort of elaborate inheritance/family tree system where you pass down some of your kit, or if you have a game based on player knowledge and skill rather than tied directly to the characters skills/abilities, do you really have permanent death? If you can fairly easily start a new character and be on equal footing with established characters, how much of a penalty is that really other than a name change?

Character death works well in p&p sessions b/c it is wholly managed by the DM/GM. A good GM could direct a game is such a fashion that a player wouldn't be bothered losing their experienced character b/c the GM could make it worthwhile. In a MMORPG setting, I still don't see how this concept would add to the long term viabilty of a game.

Xilren

Archimedes
02/26/01 02:14 PM
[re: Xilrens Twin]
Xilren, just an idea about permadeath.

I was in a fairly long running PnP campaign where characters did sometimes die permanently. This happened fairly frequently to low level characters, and much less so to high level ones. The big thing was that it almosty always had to do with the character or group deciding to do something that was obviously very risky, and then rolling badly. If you played it relatively safe, and didn't make huge mistakes you would very rarely die, and never as a high level character. When you did die, however, there were no goodies the DM gave out, no compensation for the loss. You rolled up a new character at level one with starting equipment and skills. The excitement was there. You knew that death was possible, and even likely, if you screwed up badly enough, either as a player or as a group, but it wasn't too bad because death didn't just occur randomly, only as a possible result of the player's decisions.

That's a model that could work for MMOGs if done right (yes, it would be quite hard to do right). One suggestion here has been that permadeath be possible if the player decides to have his character start PKing others. Definite decision there.

Xilrens Twin
02/26/01 03:47 PM
[re: Archimedes]
I agree that such a game with permadeath COULD be done, I just think it would be a niche game rather than one with massive appeal (think nNWN :-).

The only real problem I would have in your permadeath setting is it doesn't happen enough for it to really be effective, so when it did happen it would be construed as unjust. If you can avoid it by playing it safe, and still advance (albeit more slowly), then that is what people would do. And if they happened to be one of the few "unlucky" ones who lost their character while playing it safe, I really wouldn't think they would want to re-start. If you make it to level 25 out of 50, and by pure random bad luck, die and have to restart from level 1, where's the incentive? Especially if your friends are still level 25.

About the only system I could envision is one where each character death is subject to review by actual people (i.e. GM's in the guise of gods) who may return the character to life, allow them to enter the afterworld, or re-incarnate them in a slightly different body :). 'Course, then you have to deal with the whole GM favortism/subjective ruling thing..

Xilren

Domasai
02/27/01 12:15 AM
[re: Archimedes]
Archimedes said, "I think a large reason people see these games as games rather than world is because of the association with video-games where a character has N lives."

Bingo. A world, to me, is a place where resources - be they lives, trees, whatever - are finite in number, where they must be either replenished or replaced in some fashion. To me, the current crop of MMOGs aren't worlds because they're TOO game-like; they bear no realistic perspective on anything really. I don't consider them worlds anymore than I do, say, Tribes or Counter-Strike; the only difference is that the two I mentioned aren't persistent. In other words, the context around you doesn't remain the same over extended periods of time; they usually shift between one map or another, on a set schedule or by player request.

To my mind, being persistent doesn't necessarily make something a world; it just makes the manner in which you re-spawn slightly different each time. The current ones simply aren't persistent enough to warrant considering them worlds in my book. Persistence with infinite resources is, IMO, a bit of an oxymoron, and it's totally adverse to my viewpoint of what a world is.

True, as Dr. Bartle pointed out, others may not share my opinion; he stated that even chat rooms could be considered worlds, depending upon one's definition. But to me, we've yet to see an online world; we've seen online games that act as mock worlds.

Fighting a bear in UO: http://www.adcritic.com/content/john-west-red-salmon-bear-fight.html

Richard Bartle
02/27/01 04:25 AM
[re: Archimedes]
Another bulk reply. All that time spent as a youth writing programs for batch processing must have had an effect...

Archimedes>Well, thanks for clearing up what you meant by that article, Richard. It didn't seem much like your previous writings, probably because of the imposed word limit.

Possibly, but it was also supposed to be an opinionated column, so I deliberately wrote controversially.

>It might be tricky to get Joe Gamer to accept, but most of the folks posting here seem willing to give it a shot under the right circumstances.

The problem is that those "right circumstances" vary from person to person. Well, that and the fact that Joe Gamers outnumber Lum Standard Thoughtful Gamers a hundred to one (sigh).

>Note that one of the changes that MUST be made before permadeath is viable is that it can't result from frequent problems external to the game. These include massive lag, lost connections, and similar internet related issues.

But of course - I'd have thought that went without saying (although I may be overestimating the perspicacity of some developers, here). The key is the ability to log all game-related data. Without logging, the number of people who die in fights from carrier loss, lag, hardware failure and so on is huge; with logging, it drops to almost insignificant levels. People who claim they were suffering lag are strangely reticent to pursue their case when you can show them a time-stamped log of exactly what happened which proves they were in full control of their character right up to the end (or close enough to the end that they'd have died anyway even if they hadn't pulled the plug on their phone line in an attempt to fake disconnection). If the logs support their case that they were not in control for some crucial part of the fight, then of course they get reinstated.

There are two reasons why this approach hasn't yet found favour with massively multiplayer games, however. One is the sheer amount of data you need to log to be able to reproduce events exactly - 1K per player every 4 seconds for some games. The other is the cost of servicing customer complaints - someone has to go through those logs to check the authenticity of a claim. Fortunately, there are ways to alleviate both of these problems.

>I'm not sure, though, that player justice was ever a good concept to begin with.

It's OK as a concept, but in practice it rarely happens. Every once in a while you'll see a lynch mob, and there may be organised groups of bounty hunters, but PKs can easily stay offline until the heat is off.

>One alternative is to make the game system itself punish or prevent PKing.

I agree. Internal controls are far more effective than external ones.

>I'm still not sure here, but the article seems to be saying that PK switches are bad because they take away excitement from the game.

It does, but I'm not talking about the excitement experienced by the PKers. Rather, it's the excitement of having been under threat and come out alive experienced by the non-PKers. Indeed, as the article would have pointed out if they hadn't taken out the crucial line (sigh), PKing isn't necessarily required at all, it's PD that's important.

>Aside from the obvious possibility of diminishing rewards for PKing and/or diminishing the penalties for being PKd there is also the possibility of having the game engine tracking down the PKs and making their characters' lives a living hell.

You could make it that PKers lost all their characters and were unable to play for 3 weeks after an attack and they'd STILL do it. You'd only deter the wannabes or the people who were role-playing a darker side of themselves (a common excuse for people dallying with PKing - no-one ever seems to want to explore the lighter side of themselves...).

>Personally, I think that if a game could be designed where permadeath occurred but was rare, and mostly avoidable by the player's actions, that it could add a lot more meaning to the game in other ways than just PK-prevention.

Me too. This is what my article was about. Unfortunately, though, it doesn't solve the problem of how you get people actually to play a game with PD in it.

Xilren>Geez, leave for the weekend and you never know who might drop by.

Well, one of the illusions you get when posting to a public forum is that the only people who read it are the same members of the small community who post there.

Similarly, I thought that putting my article in the relative backwater of Edge Online wasn't going to cause any ripples because no-one would read it. How wrong I was...

>I actually think there are quite a few people who would like a ORPG type game with permanent death from a role playing perspective, but right now I don't think it very feasible for any type of mass market game.

Oh, I believe the contrary! I think it COULD be sold to the mass market - just not to gamers!

>it seems to run counter to the idea that these games you are "building" your character.

But are you really building your character when it's never ever really tested? When success is guaranteed and the only variable is how long it takes you to achieve it?

I'm personally more interested in building the, er, character of the player than of the character. I know this is idealistic, and runs counter to the now dominant American school of role-playing (choose a path and follow it, rather than the British one where you wander around exploring until you find somewhere you like); however, I'd prefer to see the player able to develop themselves rather than the inexorable rise of character stats that passes for "building" in so many games today.

>If your character is truly getting better/stronger/richer/more skilled through your daily investment of time into them, losing all that due to random chance (be it connection loss, server crash, bad random number roll in combat, or killed by a player whome you don't know) is very lacking in appeal.

I addressed this in my article, though. If you don't want to lose your character, don't go to where it could happen.

If the worst happens, you shouldn't feel it was random, either, unless it was billed as such: "Pull the lever. 51% of the time you will double in level, and 49% of the time you will die. House limit, level 50".

>In many ways that is how the acheivers keep score.

That's true, they do use character stats to keep score. It's when they realise that the stats are meaningless because any half-brained loser can get them that the problems start.

>To accomplish that growth requires the investment of time, if nothing else, and it is that perceived waste of time which bothers so many people when it comes to permadeath. That time spent with the same avatar tends to form bonds of attachement which I think help the intellectual transition of viewing the virtual space as a world and not just a game.

Yes, this is all true. That's why the threat of losing it all can add real edge to an experience that you can't get any other way. If you don't want that kind of experience, fair enough, don't go where it could happen. However, don't complain when those who did risk their characters end up better off than you (those that weren't killed, that is...).

>The only way I can think of that permadeath wouldn't hurt that much is if the game either has a very short vertical growth potential, if their is a process which allows new characters to "jump up" the growth ladder (inheritance and the like)

In other words, as you spotted, if it weren't actually permanent death at all.

Archimedes>You knew that death was possible, and even likely, if you screwed up badly enough, either as a player or as a group, but it wasn't too bad because death didn't just occur randomly, only as a possible result of the player's decisions.

That's exactly the kind of experience I want to see recaptured. Some players say they get it from EQ-like "death", which is fair enough. The other effects of PD still don't apply, though, in particular making achievement actually mean something.

The critical thing is that the player should not feel that their death was random. They should feel that they made a mistake, or took too high a risk, or were let down by their friends - anything but random (well, anything but random or "fixed by those (expletive) admins who put my name on the to-kill-at-all-costs list").

Xilren>The only real problem I would have in your permadeath setting is it doesn't happen enough for it to really be effective, so when it did happen it would be construed as unjust.

I think here's considerable scope for narrowing or widening the window in which PD can occur. Knowing what the optimum model is, however, is something else - for some people, being killed 20 times in a row is the last straw, but for others once is more than enough.

>If you can avoid it by playing it safe, and still advance (albeit more slowly), then that is what people would do.

But what if you couldn't advance AS FAR if you didn't put yourself at risk? What if, say, there were 10 levels beyond those available to people who didn't venture into places where they could get killed?

>And if they happened to be one of the few "unlucky" ones who lost their character while playing it safe, I really wouldn't think they would want to re-start.

I can only speak from experience in text MUDs with PD, but in those people DO re-start. If you've been fair to them, if they knew they were at risk, if they ignored the warnings and went ahead anyway, if they held on too long in the belief that help would come and it didn't or whatever, yes, they come back.

If PD happens too often, people won't come back because they can never get anywhere. If it happens too infrequently, they feel victimised. If it happens somewhere in between - often enough that people at higher levels feel they've achieved something, but not so often that they can't reach the higher levels in the first place - then that's best.

>If you make it to level 25 out of 50, and by pure random bad luck, die and have to restart from level 1, where's the incentive?

Who said anything about dying to pure random bad luck?

Richard

Comstr
02/27/01 06:19 AM
[re: Xilrens Twin]
Wow, I'm going to argue with a Genuine Gaming God. Twice in a year even. I feel like a Sturt light tank going up against a King Tiger, that know's I'm coming, and has already shot back at players far better than I.

Anyways, I read the thread 1st, then the article, so most of it went right over my head. The following assumptions- He's not just talking about roleplaying games, but MMOG's in general.

I know it's vaporwhere right now...but what about the Sim's online? I cannot imagine Player Killing in that...less it allows people to be Hannible the Cannible (ha ha). How does THAT fit into this???

What about the Online Flight/War/Infantry Sim's? Air Warrior, Warbirds, Planetside and WW2OL. Nothing BUT PKing, at low levels. 'Corse, in the current one (flight sims) you don't lose much bar your pride and your score. I *think* you'll lose equipent in PlanetSide, not sure. But how could you possibley have a game where eveytime the archiver enters combat, unless he's very very good, he'll die after a few missons? Hell, even the best Warbird pilots get killed after 100 or so kills. (And no, they arn't full of nothing but Killer types).

One of his major arguments is, no game without perma death in some way, won't have long term prospects compared to a game that will. Umm....huh? ("They could simply head for games where they know their character will be immortal, not realising until it's too late what that means for the game's long-term prospects.") In 20(?)years (well, 3 years since UO started) has this happened? A game will have long term prospects if it's well designed, not because it has one rule no others have! How long term is 'long term'? Some of the posters here (hands up please) have played UO for how long? Richard, what's a MUD that has players playing it for more than 3 years BECAUSE it has perma death? I've never heard of it (not a MUD player, but surly someone here would have mentioned it).

Actualy, come to think of it, I can think of ONE thing that WOULD make me risk many days of work. Real World Money. Kill the Dragon and win $500US dollers (not free acess mind you, MONEY IN THE BANK, prefrebly directly to my credit card). Gameshow style, but not a gamble. And I'd need evidence I could win 1st before I lept in. Somehow I don't see that happening till a game has no bugs and no cheats. 3010 Perhaps?

"Players will go for the games where they can't be killed, then leave when they get bored, without ever linking the fact that they've become bored with the fact that they can't be killed".

They get bored because....huh? I thought your Barlet types left for every other reason except that one. What about the Sim's, FPS's and RTS's and MassivlyMultiplayerTurnBased? Or are we JUST talking about role-playing-character-building-games-fundemently-based-on-MUD's.

Is one of the arguments that if you have imortal characters running around, less newbies will join, or is it the other way around?

"That's true, they do use character stats to keep score. It's when they realise that the stats are meaningless because any half-brained loser can get them that the problems start".

Arcording to every time I do your test, I'm an Archiver. But I'm not a very good one :(. I'd like to be more a fame kind of guy than a score kind of guy. Guess I'm too much of a socialiser.

"That's why the threat of losing it all can add real edge to an experience that you can't get any other way. If you don't wantthat kind of experience, fair enough, don't go where it could happen. However, don't complain when those who did risk their characters end up better off than you (those that weren't killed, that is...).".

But if they play better than I do they will ALWAYS be better off! Excatly what is the percentage of people in EQ who are level 60? They will always be able to risk more 'cause they won't die as often. Even if we both die at the same time when a Giant treds on us, he'll be higher, faster, as he's a better player. Are level 60 EQ characters NOT archivers? Surly the percentage who are not is very low compared to the archivers?

And as for the feeling of "risk of dienng and losing everything"....one of the reasons I quit EQ is becuase I don't want that feeling every time I have to run from Qeynos to North Karana. The feeling only lives on if the happiness does. In Warbirds it does, because dieing didn't lose me much, and I *could* enjoy a duel aginast an intellegent human being. That allows me to continue playing long after EQ drained me. The feeling I got at level SIXTEEN of losing 1 hours play...compared to losing 16 months of play? I don't like the feeling now, why should I like it when it's much much worse? Losing all your money at the Poker table does not feel any better afterwards when you think....gee, I *almost* won that jackpot.

"The critical thing is that the player should not feel that their death was random. They should feel that they made a mistake, or took too high a risk, or were let down by their friends - anything but random".

How? All MMRPG's use random (they BETTER be random) dice rolls. You can load it in your favor, but there is ALWAYS a chance something not working out, if you want the big reward. Less you mean twitch games (which have real randomess of human beings), Or Chess (Log onto the Zone, and you might play aginast Big Blue, or someone like me).

"Who said anything about dying to pure random bad luck?"

If it's aginast a Human, there will ALWAYS be someone better than me. In my case most of the population of the world. If it's aginast an AI, and luck dosn't come into it, I want to see this AI, in a game more complex than chess. If there IS no luck, how can I possibly NOT lose, as I can calculate the odds. If there is no luck, what ARE the odds? Do I lean via experiance? Wounderful, I get to go againast the dragon once per character, till I work it out myself. How long does that take? If other people tell me how to beat it, what accomplishment is that (Stratagy Guides anyone)? If I can see clear warning signs "Danger Will Robinson!", and step back, I'll just come back later till I see no danger signs, and walk through the problem. Less the Giant Spider can get lucky. Uh oh.

I can't write what I mean, I can't say what I mean, but I expect you to know what I mean. Edited by Comstr on 02/27/01 06:59 AM.

Damiano
02/27/01 07:52 AM
[re: Richard Bartle]
I get tied up at work for a couple of days, and... good lord, I don't even know where to start...

In reply to:

Things that work face to face don't always work in a computer-moderated context, of course, ...

Quite true: I certainly don't advocate slavish adherence to traditional gaming systems/techniques. Much the opposite. On the other hand, the old baby/bathwater saw comes to mind.

PnP RPG: small cohesive group, strictly moderated. MMORPG: huge disjointed group, totally unmoderated.

As to translating the Indiana Jones concept, not sure. It's very much a "lone wolf" style, but so is a lot of high fantasy fiction/drama... and that certainly has no problem being seen as a proper setting for a large scale setting. A game based on the pulp fiction (American 20s/30s fiction, not the recent movie) might be very interesting to try to set up... there is at least one GMUD out there like that right now, but it's a bit too much "style over substance" for my taste...

In reply to:

I'm a strong believer in open-endedness in online worlds, and therefore am not all that impressed by long story arcs. They do have some advantages in terms of retention of players (particularly, if anecdotal evidence is to believed, female players), however they're not great at attracting newbies. Overlapping storylines, soap-opera style, are a better bet in my view, although my ideal is for the storylines to develop as a result of player actions, rather than of those of the game's management.

No argument from me. A bit more work for the service's management team, however, I think you would agree. This is where a good cohesive group of storytellers and GMs would be a good fit in the process, I think. Give them solid tools they are comfortable with and a solid setting/foundation to work from...

My original thought on back story for characters was a bit less comprehensive than that, however. To illustrate:

Current MMORPG as a PnP campaign: "Okay, characters finished? Great. Let's get started.

Let see... you are all in a tavern. What do you do?"

Current MMORPGs as they should be: "Okay, your character is ready? Great. Let's get started.

You've chosen to be a dwarf, and want to be a cleric. Are you interested in your parents at all? Okay, let's see: your mother, Karreda Mithrilweaver ka-Marradon, is a smith currently working in the forges at Karredin's Watch. Your father, Marradon, died in the Second Battle of Fommori some 30 years ago: not surprising, about 30% of the current dwarven population can say that about at least one of their parents. You were raised in Karredin's Watch, of course, and have many good friends amongst the guards there, most particularly your dad's second cousin Dwerrin and Gorran Deepstalker, Captain of the Guard (No-Go to the kids, because he keeps telling them not to go there, or there, or there...)

Now, on the world on Arnak, there are many gods, but Dwarves usually worship either one of their own pantheon, or the ancient Pentar empire god Thorbaddin, god of volcanos and the earth. Thorbaddin sounds interesting, you say? Okay, there are three major temples you could have trained at in your apprenticeship: one at Dororock in the northern steppes, a medium-sized town on the trade route between..."

For my money, I'd say the second would be the more effective way of introducing players to the world and encouraging them to invest a piece of themselves in it. Giving them people they "know", places they've "been", developing an overview of the setting and it's recent history as it would have impacted them during their "youth".

A concept from PnP gaming far more useful and applicable than the d20 randomizer or "hit points". A lot of work creating a forest of branches for players to select from amongst and climb along, I admit, but well worth the effort, I believe.

In reply to:

I like the idea too, but how are you going to persuade people to play your game when they won't go anywhere near one where their character is GUARANTEED to DIE?

I don't think you can, in many cases, until the player is ready for it. As I look back on my PnP experience, there is definitely a "learning curve" you see in players, over and over again. I truly believe the same curve will apply in the virtual realm.

Players often talk about the "magic" of their first session or campaign. They didn't have a clue what was going on, etc., but it was a blast.

Subsequently, one of two things happen. They become practiced and experienced, know the basic game rules in and out, can tell you what is going to happen 5 minutes before it does... and wonder aloud where the "magic" went, probably leaving the hobby for good shortly thereafter.

Or, they experiment with different game systems and genres, expand their notions of how the game should work (suddenly, not all orcs are "evil", not all humans are "good", not all adventures are "find dungeon, kill monsters, sell treasure, repeat", and so on...) and continually rediscover the "magic" in a less intense yet more satisfying way... making the hobby a life-long experience.

To my mind, the first batch of "Joe Gamers" are in stage 1, many nearing the end of that part of the cycle. Veteran PnP players, MUDders, etc. are waiting for (even praying for) both "critical mass" and the right systems/titles at the right time to take advantage of it before it falls away to become a repeat of the "yeah, I played that back when I was in high school/college" syndrome. Perhaps that is inevitable, anyway... but I certainly hope not.

I know, sounds corny, but I think there's a "kernel" of truth to all the above. (pun intended)

My two cents.

"There is no problem that cannot be made infinitely worse through the proper application of utter ignorance." - Me

Damiano, EQ Prexus etc...

Damiano
02/27/01 08:21 AM
[re: Xilrens Twin]
It is my long-held opinion that 1) a believable threat of perma-death is far more effective than it's actual occurrence, and 2) a perma-death implementation neither needs to be, nor should be, universal in scope.

The argument against permanent death invariably includes something to the effect of "but if I get to 30th level and die, it's certainly not going to be fun!" Quite true: but why are you so worried about it?

Only the cruelest hardened criminals "make sure" someone is dead to begin with. Animals IRL rarely attack until an opponent is truly dead, especially something they don't identify with "food"... a large part of the reason the rare "man-eater" in nature is hunted so ruthlessly in parts of the world where such is a potential danger. In war, who has time to check if that last opponent is truly dead? Highwaymen, thieves, and bandits generally want your money, not your life... put up enough of a fight and give them a chance to escape, they'll take it unless desperate. Undead, aliens, robots and the like might be real issues... but there are a variety of ways to subtly mitigate those effects.

In short, the only real danger of perma-death in a cohesive well-plotted setting comes from the other players to begin with... and in those cases, subtle mechanics can be put in place to reinforce the basic understanding that "this is just not allowed", without shredding the fiction as a byproduct.

On the other hand, an adventurer going hand-to-hand with the dragon terrorizing the land might -want- to go out in a blaze of glory (gods, I'm pun-nish today), especially if it turned the tide in the battle for his comrades as a result... i.e. a hero's death. The stuff of legend. That kind of thing.

And I do believe it can all be 99.9% achieved through a properly tuned set of mechanics in a larger robust and complex game system, yes.

My two cents.

Damiano, EQ Prexus etc...

0.5robo
02/27/01 08:48 AM
[re: Richard Bartle]
Richard Bartle wrote: >There are two reasons why this approach hasn't yet found favour with massively multiplayer games, however. One is the sheer amount of data you need to log to be able to reproduce events exactly - 1K per player every 4 seconds for some games. The other is the cost of servicing customer complaints - someone has to go through those logs to check the aut