Things I Will Do Differently When I Make My Own MMO

[mouselock]

1. I will try to give the user a modicum of information when things (invariably) go wrong. Among other things, this means I will not tell the user "You have failed to log in." when the user has failed to log in. Since I expect the user to continue playing my game for a long time, and since one requires the brainpower of your average hamster in order to play my game, I will assume the user has figured out they have failed to log in when they see their character fail to appear before them after typing the log in message.

2. Similarly, I will not tell the user to "wait a few minutes and try again". I like to believe I do my job well. Therefore, I will expect that my user probably is very impatient to play my game. In such a case, I realize that the user will have a skewed sense of time. Knowing that this is the case, and the havoc trying to process 70 bazillion (I did mention I expect to be good at this whole game making thing, right?) logins every 4.8 seconds (which, after all, is reasonably close to 'a few minutes') creates, I will instead institute a nice, calm, sane, and rational timer that automatically tries to log the user in on a nice, calm, sane, and rational schedule - say, every 2 minutes until stopped.

(Feel free to add your own. I'm trying to check out the AA beta, and was just amused by the game's continual insistence on telling me, when it fails to log me in, that it has failed to log me in. God help NCSoft and NetDevil if they actually need to give their beta testers such a message! :) )

[McBain]

You know, I was going to post the stock "I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscirbe to your newsletter" bit, but these are actually pretty good ideas.

[mouselock]

Dammit, I was trying for flippant and funny, too!

[Miramon]

1. I will try to give the user a modicum of information when things (invariably) go wrong. Among other things, this means I will not tell the user "You have failed to log in." when the user has failed to log in.

I kind of like "General System Error: 190037" myself. Short, pithy, and to the point. Has no useful denotation at all, except to distress the player, but conveys by connotation the idea there are thousands of other possible general system errors, and that the engineering team managed to find and assign a number to each one without actually preventing them from happening. Sort of gives me a warm fuzzy glow, really. Of course a hex value like 0xFFFE0AB1is more technical, but that just looks like gibberish to most people, so the decimal value is probably better to convey a maximally offputting feeling for the players, who we love to death. Really.

[Munky]

I was hoping for a pithy zing at HRose myself...

[Mike Hussey]

Putting on my Astrologer's hat (dropped by a raptor outside Ratchet) I predict that your forum will still be flooded by posts along the lines of 'OMFG your sevice sux!!! I'm paying a lot of money - $2-00 per month - for 24/7 access and I couldn't login FOR TWO WHOLE MINUTES. I'm going back to Ultima Online and no, you can't have my stuff.'

[mouselock]

Putting on my Astrologer's hat (dropped by a raptor outside Ratchet) I predict that your forum will still be flooded by posts along the lines of 'OMFG your sevice sux!!! I'm paying a lot of money - $2-00 per month - for 24/7 access and I couldn't login FOR TWO WHOLE MINUTES. I'm going back to Ultima Online and no, you can't have my stuff.'

Along with cries of "OMGWTFBBQ why do I have to wait *so long* between login attempts to get in! I want to get in now, not when your stupid program thinks I should log in again! I'm going back to WoW!"

[Robert Sharp]

I was hoping for a pithy zing at HRose myself...

Actually, HRose did predict that mouselock would suggest these changes. He said so in his blog six months ago.

[Creole Ned]

If I was designing an MMORPG, I'd start every player with a pony. It's hard to complain about a game when it gives you a pony right up front.

[tglennow]

Just don't be this guy:

[Mehrunes]

What I would do...

Polish Above All Else:

Honestly, I think the only MMORPG I've played that I could trully call polished is CoH. I'm talking about all the little annoying things, the small bugs, the minor bits of broken content, the "I wish you could do this..." and "This would make things so much less annoying" moments that people encounter on a day to day basis.

All of this stuff adds up and compounds with interest in games as repetitive and time consuming as MMORPGs and can easily exceed the "I can't take this any more, call me if x, y and z get fixed" quotient. Because of this, in my mind, polish is more important in MMORPGs than in any other genre and there's just not enough of it to go around.

[Pentadact]

"You have failed to log in."

I love the language of these things, too - you have failed. Actually, I haven't. I did my part perfectly. What went wrong was, you fucked up.

I had a slightly silly but vaguely appealing idea while playing Eve recently, about how to integrate a proper plot line into a MMOG without leaving most people out of it. I call it the nomad plot: something around which the story centers - say, an emperor - is travelling. He/it has to get somewhere for some plot-crucial reason, and in practise that will involve him and his entourage passing through every major area. While there, local quest givers and ones that came with him offer story quests to do with protecting or attacking him, and while it isn't possible to entirely achieve either in the short term, the devs can look at each faction's performance while the nomad plot was passing through, and have the story develop in the favour of the most successful party.

Agree about polish, Meh, but funnily enough the one game with a single, deal-breaking irritation, for me, is the most polished of the lot: City Of Heroes. I cannot abide XP debt.

I gave up on WoW too, of course, but there it was an accumulation of irritations coupled with an absence of reasons to overcome them - combat no fun, no choices in character development, 95% of quests mind-numbingly repetitive.

[Pentadact]

Oh yeah, that's what I'd do: make good quests. Kill X Ys is unforgivable.

[Robert Sharp]

Agree about polish

Ok, now I know I am getting sleepy. When I first read this, I thought, "What did Mouselock say about the Polish? Was it a joke? Is he not going to let Polish people play his MMOG? Gotta sleep now.

[Sean Hargraves]

To me, persistence meant whatever interaction you made with the environment, you could see what you changed in some tangible form and until someone else affected it, it would stay that way.

For some reason, persistence in a MMORPG means no matter what you (or anyone) do, nothing changes. Everything is static. In fact, everything is stuck in a temporal causality time loop where events occur repeatedly. Until the next patch anyway.

I think a procedurally designed MMORPG would be ideal.

[Michael Fitch]

I think a procedurally designed MMORPG would be ideal.

Greetings:
I have to agree. If we could get the code to do the design, we could get a lot more content with a lot less payroll overhead.

The only problem I can see is that you'd probably want a designer to spec out the system.

Michael.

[mouselock]

I think a procedurally designed MMORPG would be ideal.

Greetings:
I have to agree. If we could get the code to do the design, we could get a lot more content with a lot less payroll overhead.

The only problem I can see is that you'd probably want a designer to spec out the system.

Michael.

I'm assuming it's not this simple, because procedural generation (especially of semi-complex, semi-believable systems) isn't a new idea and has been done academically in many ways.

So I'm guessing the difference is to get the academically interesting stuff to translate well into a game.