Found at The Virtual Fortress of Ashen Temper, Dreadflame’s “Five keys to a successful MMORPG.”

I’ll comment on them later. For now, I’ll include copies from the Stratics pages.

Five Keys to a successful MMORPG:
Article One

What these articles are… what they are not:

First of all, let me stress that this is not an exhaustive treatment of the MMORPG genre, nor does it attempt to be scientific in distilling the absolute necessities of success for this type of game. Rather, these are my thoughts on some of the necessary elements, the things that are done well, the things that need to be done, and the things we can hope to see done in the second generation of MMORPGs.

In short, while these are not the five keys to end all keys, they are five keys nonetheless.

These are my views and are not necessarily synonymous with those of Wolfpack. Shadowbane is my frame of reference, of course, and I have to tip my hat to Warden and the team for actualizing some brilliant ideas and being willing to push the envelope in a number of new directions. Of those things, I am allowed to tell you little. I will, however, drop hints where I can.

Key #1: Give the players what they want.

Finding a general concept for “giving players what they want” is relatively easy. Listing all imaginable extensions of this idea is impossible. I will approach two that are dear to my heart.

Part I: Playable Races

Giving the players what they want is not about handing out pHaT LeWt on a shovel. It’s about identifying elements that interest people and incorporating them into the game.

I am always amazed at how game developers like to hash out whatever it is that the last guy did. That’s not news by a long shot –Hollywood does it every day, and I’m certainly not the first to point it out. It comes as no surprise, then, that in their eagerness to clone what the last guy did they become completely unwilling to test new ground.

There was something refreshing that really struck me in the release of the D&D Third Edition. That attitude of the books, especially the Dungeon Master’s Guide, was that the Dungeon Master should craft the world to the players. Not that he might, or could, but that he should. For the first time, the D&D books said “here’s how to make monster races playable” rather than “if you’re some deviant idiot who wants to play a monster, well, get over it.”

Playable monster races are challenging to the beginner, but greatly desired and appreciated by the experienced roleplayer.

Why not have playable races that can fly?
Why not have quadrupeds, like centaurs, as playable races?
Why not make it possible to do fae, or werewolves, or vampires?

I can give you the “standard” answers to these questions, of course. It comes down to a required amount of effort, creativity, and balancing that are frequently abandoned as “too much work.”

These aren’t showstoppers, though. True, we’re not talking about fruit hanging at the bottom of the tree, but it is fruit you can get to with a ladder. It requires initiative, some risk, and a little bit of vision to go after these sorts of things.

[Dreadflame’s Gem] … Push the envelope. Pick some of the hard to reach fruit from the tree.

Part II: Player Strongholds

Why does a kid like to have a tree house? What’s the appeal of having a small collection of planks and ropes nestled perilously high above the ground?

I imagine that ten kids would give you ten different answers, but I think it could be distilled down to this: it’s a cool place, in both reality and make-believe, and kids can call it their own.

People like to have something to call their own. As players of a video game, it’s appealing to carve out a piece of world and say, “this is mine.” It fulfills the human need to be great.

Ultima Online opened the door with player housing, a noble experiment that succeeded in as many ways as it failed. The critical problem that UO ran into was that their player housing let people “leave their mark” a little too much. Most everyone who played the game in its first year or so can remember houses everywhere- blocking roads and cluttering the landscape. For all its warts, however, I still consider it one of the best selling points of the game and still have my own house on the Sonoma shard.

There’s a lot of fruit to be plucked from the Tree of MMORPG success, and player strongholds are a good place to start. “Player housing,” in fact, is a self-limiting term. There’s a lot of fertile ground above and beyond the player cabin in the woods.

Why not a sewer Thieves Den that a guild can own?
Why not a hideout at the bottom of the City Well?
Why not a stronghold secreted deep within the tomb city of a long dead race?

One of the problems with most “player housing” to date is the very limited idea of who the player character is. The standard outlook is inherited from first edition AD&D where the player character is limited to Joe Adventurer who lives just outside of town, shops at the local market, and goes and smashes orcs for fun. When Joe gets really successful he upgrades his cabin to a castle.

That’s all fine and well, except that we would like to incorporate many more archetypes into an MMORPG. While I’m saving the player driven game for a later article, suffice to say that we want people to play the thieves, the antagonists, the rivals, the ensconced nobility, and the covert allies of the game world. A lot of these people don’t stay at the Inn across from the Adventurer’s Guild. Player strongholds need to embrace that diversity.

[Dreadflame’s Gem] … Give the players something to call their own.

This leads naturally into the next article: player driven and story driven plots, which we’ll talk about next time.

Five Keys to a Successful MMORPG (Part II)

Key #2: Have a player-driven game

There is a key lesson to be learned in comparing tabletop (TT) roleplaying games with live action roleplay (LARP) that applies directly to the MMORPG level. In a tabletop game, the non-player characters represent 99% of the game world. In the LARP, player characters represent 99% of the people you see “on-stage” at any given time.

There is the tendency for a developer to try to bend a single player game into a persistent world. The problem that arises stems from the fact that every player wants to be the star of the show, and the game cannot resolve or be exclusively shaped by the actions of only a few. As I mentioned while discussing player strongholds, the story needs to accommodate more than the archetype of the local hero. The players must drive the game from all angles, as hero and villain, liege and lackey, monster and monster-slayer.

Part I: World Resources

What can a character do to the story if they cannot shape the world they live in? A villain has little purpose if he or she cannot cast their evil shadow over the land. Bavmorda wouldn’t have been much of a threat in Willow if her army, lead by General Kael, wasn’t rapidly gaining control of more and more territory.

What happens when the Dragon Armies, the Soviets, or the Trade Federation gets control of the place you live? They restrict your weapons, they tax you to death, they tell you what to do, and they potentially kill you or your family when you don’t comply.

For just a moment, let’s set aside the “killing” part of the equation, and look at it just in terms of your stuff. Machievelli wrote that it was preferable to kill somebody as punishment rather than take their money or their women. Why? Because if you took their money or their women you made it personal.

If we think about this, we start to get an idea of what we need to consider in letting players have influence over what goes on and who controls what in a persistent world. You become drawn directly into conflicts and player stories, (or at very least, cannot ignore them), when things that you rely upon are in short supply or are controlled by someone else. Let us consider a brief list of viable resources:

# Personal Risk: If I can affect the ease with which you leave town, traverse a dungeon, or cross a mountain range, I have influence upon a resource.
# Magic: This would include the components needed for spells. If we live in a world where we can define such things as ley lines, magic dead areas, and magical nodes, we can create an environment in which players can manipulate background magic and prevent others from benefiting from it. I am personally surprised we’ve never seen anything similar to the old Electronic Arts game Archon in a persistent world.
# Gold: Controlling the day-to-day currency of any economy is a vast subject, so I’ll just mention that players need to be able to affect costs of goods and services. Guilds need to be able to levy taxes on passers-by, while giving breaks to their members.
# Transportation: If you can hinder or expedite another character’s ability to move between worlds, shards, or regions, you have control of a viable resource.
# Magic Items: Players of RPGs the world over want more Phat Lewt. If there is a limit to the number or availability of magic items in the world, and somebody is responsible for that, then a resource is pinned down and under control.

Now, it’s important to note that we want these available through tunable, play-testable mechanisms. If you create an environment where life is just awful for 99% of the population, while the remaining 1% is getting rich on e-bay, you’ve done something wrong.

[Dreadflame’s Gem] … Let the players have meaningful control of the world’s resources.

Part II: The Stars of the Show

Nobody likes to play a schmoe. Given the choice, people would rather engage in tasks that provide entertainment as opposed to those which are monotonous. In a story, one would rather be a hero who ventures off into foreboding dungeons to seek lost treasure, rather than the guard who stands on the city walls and does nothing else until the hero comes back.

The environment of an MMORPG has to provide for the players to assume the roles of the major and minor stars of the show. It does the players a disservice if they have to log on and engage in extremely monotonous tasks for hours on end.

The NPCs, which form the other part of the “cast” of the world, need to be influenced and affected by the PCs. More importantly, they need to assume boring or repetitive roles at the behest of the PCs. In terms of my previous point, player characters need to affect them so as to control the resources in the world.

Ultima Online scored with the player vendors. It was a system directly harmed by the shortage of housing in the world, but it nevertheless went part of the way to giving players control in the game.

Why not go further? Give players the ability to have monstrous servitors guarding their keeps? Give player run cities the archers, regular, and irregular troops they need to keep the peace and drive off enemies? Create additional luxury sinks for the hard-core players to distinguish themselves in a fashion that is positive for the game?

[Dreadflame’s Gem] … Make players the star of the show.

Part III: The Flaw: Grief Players

Rant sites have spent untold bandwidth back and forth on the topic of the Grief Player. The important thing to note is that a player who gets his jollies solely from making other people angry does not advance the game and does not increase revenues. There will always be grief players, and it is the responsibility of the game developer to make it difficult for them to prosper and deal with them firmly and consistently when they become a problem.

Underlying this is good customer service. Any intense roleplaying situation will have people high-strung, and you do not want to ban somebody just because they were cutting people down as their evil armies rode into town. A world needs its villains, so long as they exist within a reasonable framework of the game and its fiction.

Because of grief players, designers must exercise great caution in creating checks and balances on player ability to influence the world. If something can be exploited or used to needlessly aggravate other players, somebody is probably going to try it.

Part IV: Player Story

The conclusion of this comes down to players being able to tell their own stories in the context of the game, with real and meaningful “ripples” going out through the game world. If a player assumes the role of the Herald of the Abyss, there needs to exist a series of events by which he or she can organize an army, influence towns, travel and trade, and engage in actions that actually provide a truly player orchestrated and executed fiction within the context of the game.

Everything else, the capricious turn of events and actions of other non-player powers is the subject of Story Driven Game, which I will discuss in my next article.

[Dreadflame’s Gem] … Let the players tell a story that impacts the world.

Ashen Temper hasn’t had much more luck than I have finding the missing three keys. Lum had a copy of Mischyf’s commentary in 2001. Thank goodness Google had it cached:

KEYS TO A SUCCESSFUL MMOG [Author: myschyf]

So what, you may ask, has got my panties all in a wad? Why am I going off about easy steps to game development. Well I’ll tell you and this won’t be pretty. Thomas K.A. “Dreadflame” Stitch is a programmer for Wolfpack Studios. Before he worked on Shadowbane he was a programmer for Alzheimer’s research. A noble and worthwhile endeavor. It doesn’t exactly make one an expert on MMOGs. In any case he’s published two of his “Five Keys to a Successful MMOG.” I respectfully submit he doesn’t know. He’s got some good ideas. No doubt about it.

Hell, everyone has good ideas. But no one knows what the keys to a successful MMOG are. If they did – they’d be churning them out like wildfire going through dry brush. If they did – Shadowbane would, no doubt, not be over a year behind their first projected beta date (which, by the way, starts today). If they did, we wouldn’t have to keep revising the expected release date of every MMOG in development today. Making MMOGs is HARD and EXPENSIVE. Good ideas, when actually put into development, turn out to be a game developer’s worst nightmare. “It seemed like a good idea at the time” never applied so aptly to any genre like it does to MMOG design.

So what are some of my specific objections? I thought you’d never ask. Lets start at the beginning.

Dreadflame sez: “Give the players what they want.”

OK. Hedron wants to PVP. These people want to PK. These people just want to make other people unhappy. LOH wants to build player cities. I could go for a good loaf of bread myself. My man Arcadian just wants to play with his hat. Reconcile these playstyles.

Player races are all very well and good. But UO doesn’t have player races and its a very successful MMOG. Player strongholds are good too. But AC doesn’t even have bank boxes and it is a successful MMOG. You can’t please everyone. You can’t! To think you can is madness. You can try to create some sort of happy medium but that’s about the best one can achieve in this field.

Dreadflame sez: “Underlying this is good customer service. Any intense roleplaying situation will have people high-strung, and you do not want to ban somebody just because they were cutting people down as their evil armies rode into town. A world needs its villains, so long as they exist within a reasonable framework of the game and its fiction.

“Because of grief players, designers must exercise great caution in creating checks and balances on player ability to influence the world. If something can be exploited or used to needlessly aggravate other players, somebody is probably going to try it.”

Players in UO have been mostly banned for exploiting. Players in EQ have been banned for everything under the sun EXCEPT player killing – given that you can’t, you know, PK in EQ. Players in AC have been banned for – you guessed it – exploiting (despite Turbine’s comments to the contrary). I suppose if someone makes enough of a nuisance out of player killing that s/he causes many others to quit then that player has been banned. Somehow I can’t really feel sorry for that player. But really, PKing is not the cause of most banning. Exploiting bugs are. So lets talk about bugs in MMOGs.

You can’t put out a bug-free MMOG. You can’t. It hasn’t been done yet and it never will be. A 20-person QA department simply cannot match the destructive power of two-hundred-thousand players. All major software releases have large amounts of bugs in it. Air traffic control systems have large amounts of bugs. What they don’t have are two hundred thousand people trying to break or exploit it. Lest you doubt me consider this quote from First Monday “Computer systems that are vital to public safety and welfare are operating with closed, commercial code, which is loaded with unknown (and unknowable) bugs. Consider the USS Norfolk lying dead in the water for two hours after the failure of its onboard NT systems, and you’ll get the idea.” Or this one from SD Times “Today, our primary defense against buggy software is testing. And therein lies the fundamental problem: Testing takes too long, is too manual-intensive, doesn t find all the bugs, and is typically only performed at the end of the development cycle. A study by Capers Jones reports that even the best software development organizations are only 85 percent effective in removing bugs. A report by The Standish Group is even more dismal: The typical testing effort identifies only 30 to 40 percent of defects present.”

To expect any MMOG to put out a bug-free product is setting yourself up for failure. The very best a game company can do is fix the bugs quickly and deal swiftly and harshly with exploiters. Making statements that exploiters should not be banned is as irresponsible as not fixing them swiftly. It encourages exploitation.

Never mind that this is the exact demographic that Shadowbane marketed itself to for the first year of its existence. Consider this quote from Ronald MacDonald’s website from about a year ago: “I looked at your sites, actually. No conventional game company would ever consider including you as a part of their marketing campaign. For this reason alone, we’re excited to work with you. I firmly believe that we have the opportunity to make our own mistakes, while at the same time introducing the net to an entirely new breed of asshole… if you guys want to cover us, lemme know what I can do to help. – Warden, Wolfpack”

I know the story has changed somewhat but revisionist history irritates me. Wolfpack’s attitude now is that pointing at the huge hulking beast called “Dewdicus Rex” waiting to enter the game is impolite. Or bad marketing. Or they need more players than Dewdicus Rex can provide. Or something. I refer you to my key #1 – The game must be profitable.

I look forward to the rest of Dreadflame’s Keys to Success. However he may want to consider the words of someone with just a little bit more experience in the field. Someone like this gal.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2001 at 4:25 pm

I suppose someone like Ashen Temper would be in the best position to ask Thomas ‘Dreadflame’ Sitch (now called Grogbeard) if he still has a copy after four years, although from Ashen’s comments on his board, it seems unlikely.