Heh, grandma's wal-mart laptop. Was a good read.

Originally posted by eburn

I like the article but wasin't it a bit; obvious writer writes things obviously?

If anyone learned anything new here then good for you. The design process is hell and people on the internet are a bunch of fuckwads. Droving in packs loving this and hating that is typical. Too bad typical is often associated with acceptable.

Yet some here still can't seem to see what is meant instead of what is literal.

What a load..

"It's hard, so you guys can't complain!!"

sums up this entire spew..

I think the odd array of everyone posting here is a testiment to just how a normal playerbase responds to a game.  Some only see the negative.  Some try to be encouraging.  Some approach things objective and balanced, while others are completely leaning on one aspect for their opinions. 

Remarkable read.  Does it make me a bad person if reading this makes me want to develop video games more?   I'm a glutton for punishment.

Great Article, very entertaining. I can definitely see the makings of a good sitcom here.

However, you do kind of paint the average MMO gamer as a bit of a 'tool'. But that's okay. By looking at some of the comments here, i feel you may be on to something. Let's face it, we'll never be satisfied !

Very well written article. you hit alot of issues on the head that concerns developers when designing and developing a full fledged MMO. Being a developer myself, These are the very things that concern me as we start progressing with development of our game. Let's not fool ourselves people are intellgent and will find creative ways to be down right annoying for absolutely no rhyme or reason other than to annoy the crap out of other players, and find ways to exploit a game in their favor. There is so many things to take in consideration when designing something as complex as a MMO. Well anyways, good article, hope to see more.

I NEVER create accounts on web pages like this, but after reading this article, I had to. Everything of what the writer said was very true. It is funny, there are responces to this article, claiming that there are holes, but the people responding are the same people that the writer points out as those who always say, "But what if a player invites a player into their group and THEN spams heals?" 

Anyway, I just had to post saying that I loved this article, becuase I have had MANY of the exact conversations with people before. Some people just dont understand, and are too full of themselves so they post these, "I found a hole in your article!" LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME!!!

Seriously, get a life.

For simple minded individuals the article feels like going to a club and watching some comedy spoof of MMORPG design pet peeves.

The article doesnt try hard enough, doesnt take it too seriously either, it doesnt prove anything, except that it doesnt want to prove anything, just get provide some giggles. The goal of the article is "not to achieve anything", but remain stale. It approaches subjects discussed for generations, whose issues had been addressed by our brilliant minds already and treat them as if they were paradoxes of game design.

For example...

The solution for "Classes" (a sub-branch of Balance), is to remove the notion of balance itself.

Here is how some games did it themselfs:

You allow all the players to learn all the skills, abilities, spells, wich one in different degrees. In resume, players could do fireballs, fly, swordfight, dispell magic, heal, buff, poison, etc...

All players remain with the potential to learn and do everything, FROM START TO FINISH.

Without caps to the ammount of combined skills in whatever values they can learn other the time and effort they spend on said virtual persistant world.

This remove the concept of static classes, and the impossibility of balancing them.

People start a new character, fresh, they could learn fighting with an axe and the more they fight with an axe, the better they become with it, more effective they are, this doesnt mean, the character cant learn how to use a sword, or a necromantic magic or any other skills.

This makes it so players decide wich role they want to play in and addapt their progression according to their needs. You want to learn this now?  Fine, do it. You dont need to "unlearn" what you had "learned" before and what you "learned" before doesnt limit your ability to learn something new either.

Some people advocate that in the end, we end up with everyone being equal, mage tanks, but this is a falacy.

The sheer ammount of possibilities and things to learn and the time and effort required to do so would make it so everyone wont have a maxed out character or a fully independent character due to the restriction of time and effort spent by players.

People will focus on different things at different times and their roles will switch at any time. People can play with their friends or with people they dont know, there is no class prejudice, there is no level prejudice, there isnt limiting factors to experience content, or scripts to follow....

In Saga of Ryzom people could learn all skills, but it would take years playing it casually. In Ultima Online, people could learn all the skills, but it would take months to max out all skills (and thats because macroing, in my idea, each skill progression would have its own gameplay making it so people cant macro or use bots and the gameplay itself for each skill would be a mini-game of sorts entertaining enough so people would actually have fun enjoying the journey, rather than rushing to the destination).

The destination: maxing out everything, or a combination of combat skills, wouldnt take just 2 weeks and then progression stops like todays games, it would last persistantly with the world the characters are living in, for many months to years: it would be made so you cant "rush" evolution in detriment to enjoying the game.

If two players decide to learn the same skills, then they would be "balanced". Balance would still exist. People who learn different skills could always learn new skills and every skill would complement each other, directly or indirectly.

If somebody decided to learn lets say fire elemental spells and other decided to learn archery, doesnt mean that archery have to be as strong as magery. We dont need to balance between skills! Since players can learn anything at any time.

But we could do so that both archery and magery can be evolved, making people better at one or another, the time to evolve both dont need to be at the same rate, or have the same gameplay, or take the same effort or resources to do so, neither whatever final effect it causes to have any relation with that.

A fireball would be respected for what it is, a fireball, an arrow, would be an arrow. The developer decides wich one is, accordingly to the world setting/lore more damaging according to each players sets of skills. If one players decides to learn archery and he finds someone who decided to learn fire elemental spells, and he loses the combat, you cant argue that the game is not balanced because fire elemental spell is better, therefore it has to be "balanced" so both do the same damage at the same level. This is a mistake. You can make it so player skill factor in the aiming, you can make it so players skill can strafe, you can make it so people can have fire elemental resistances, or piercing resistant armor, there would be a wide range of factors working alongside.

The positive effects greatly surpass any negative effect. Even if a player has all skills maxed after 2 years, it doesnt mean he alone can defeat everyone or every npc. It doesnt mean said player is auto suficient either, because there is so much you can do with your time and effort: you have lets say 100 skills to choose, and even if all of them are maxed you cant do everything at the same time, or in a reasonable time, so even in the ridiculous example of having a player reaching a point after 2 years where he can do almost everything, there will still be plenty of uses for other players interaction.

99,9% of the player base will have to interact with each other all the time, because people know different skills, and they need each other to make something, out of many proccess...

And then, after you get to a point where you have hundreds of players with near maxed combat skills, in different combat skills and they fight each other and discover that certain skills are better at certain tasks in certain situations, its not a problem that needs to be "balanced". We have a handfull of abilities, some are better than others at certain functions, like fireballs could be better at killing groups of human players close to each other at long range, but then at close range it wouldnt be so imbalanced, or at single targets, or depending on wich type of magic resistance the other character is using...

The whole point is that allowing players to be free to choose what they want to learn when they want to and change it at their discretion at any point is how it should be, because it brings more positive effects than negative effects.

For this to work, you would have to have a world that doesnt offer just "combat", you have to make it complex, full of inter-relation webs and nets, where people need all skills and feel overwhelmed by the possibilities and their limited time so they have to relate with other players to help each other, make friendships, work together, accomplish stuff. Thats how you make a social system, with a net of interests/needs.

If you make it so people can only do combat, and everyone is capable and independent at that you dont have a natural social system, you have to rely in grouping mechanics. Bringing up instances, limit of party members, loot segregation, level requisites, xp share limitations....

When you opt for "balance" you have to start limiting everything to prevent people from going out of the script, its not fun, its not interactive... you destroy the whole genre with linearity and tightly controled system just so "all players can reach end game and pvp after 2 weeks of release"

The conceptual pillars of "Balance". Once you break that, everything falls apart and you start making a true MMORPG again.

AHH WALL OF TEXT!!! You scare me Interesting....

But I dont want you to be able to have better spells then my sword of awsomeness!!! Who are you to be able to have  a mage than can do more damage then moi? What about the solo factor? I want to be able to do it all by myself and 2 weeks later be saying the company did a crappy job cause there is nothing more to do. I should be able to roll my face on the keyboard and do as much damage as you! I mean come on, I can probably mash my button faster than you so I should be able to do twice as much damage.

Which is the response you are going to get from a lot of people, I honestly follow what you are saying, unless your doing millions of more damage that I am that should only be cause I am a crappy player not because the capability to do some damage is not there. I agree with what you are saying in other words, this whole balancing thing always screws everything up, and everyone cries about the balance issues, why does X player with X job do more damage than I do, we should all be the same.

The issue you will run into though is that everyone will be that mage cause he is great, no one will want to be an archer because they stink. People do not want to have to think most of the time, they want to have an easy time when it comes to configuring there job, that is why in most games it is not a lot of configuration with skills people will follow some cookie cutter set up and not worry about it. So with that cookie cutter set up done all they want to do is mash buttons and see big numbers for damage, they don't really care about the game that much they just want to see those big hits of awesomeness.

And this is one of the reasons that WoW has some of the issues it has everyone wants to balance there class cause they dont want to have to think they dont want to develop a character they want everything handed to them, which makes little sense to me but what ever. And it's not just WoW a lot of other games do the same damn thing. Since you have 11 million people bitching and complaining the WoW devs end up spending more time on trying to ballance the class then trying to improve the game.

Good informative read for all and trolls.

I find it hilarious that some of the "target" audience  of this article missed the point :P

GG

If this is an actual look into how these games are being created... then I'm not surprised so many of them fail...

When will developers learn that gameplay is king? Screw the shelves and barrel designs and fancy graphic, I'll play with stick figures if I can have a game with some decent gameplay that gives you the FEEL of being in a credible world.

fancy looks doesn't help if it feels fake.

You make it sound more complex to make a MMO than it really is.

The majority of the time-sink (man-hours) is spent developing visible content, not programming.  As you show in your pictures, there are software toolsets for creating and modifying a MMO.  You don't have to be a computer programmer with a degree to use them, either.  Sure, 3d modeling takes a lot of practice and experience to use, but once you have the basics of the game together, evironment objects like barrels and even buildings can be copied and pasted.

The programming part of the MMO has been done enough times that it is easy to reproduce.  Network coding can be tricky to balance betwen bandwidth and quality, but the rest is fairly simple logic.

I'm not saying a quality game doesn't take a lot of time and work to produce.  I will say that it can be done faster, if it weren't for the people working on MMOs.  When the majority of your staff consists of "artists" with no technical degree, things get delayed because everyone feels like their "artistic touch" has to be in the game.  Quality art is one thing, but taking several days to produce one weapon model is why MMOs take so long.

Just because we offer players the freedom to train their "fist" skill, doesnt mean that we have to make it balanced with the "assault rifle" skill.

A fist obviously suck compared to the assault rifle. Anyone who comes expecting that the fist skill should be better than the assault rifle is out of their minds.

In real life if people had easier access to assault rifle, they would pick it over pitch forks any day. The balance behind it is that assault rifles are ilegal, hard to acquire, to hide, maintain and damn expensive, while fists are always there for you.

Originally posted by Interesting

Just because we offer players the freedom to train their "fist" skill, doesnt mean that we have to make it balanced with the "assault rifle" skill.

A fist obviously suck compared to the assault rifle. Anyone who comes expecting that the fist skill should be better than the assault rifle is out of their minds. In real life if people had easier access to assault rifle, they would pick it over pitch forks any day. The balance behind it is that assault rifles are ilegal, hard to acquire, to hide, maintain and damn expensive, while fists are always there for you.

 

I have read your first reply and this one. In my opinion you make it sound a little bit too easy. I'm afraid the balancing topic is much more complex than that. Developers don't "want" to limit players by introducing classes. It's rather a means of bringing the few most important main skills into balance and fun for the majority. In order to make money, you will have to make the game fun for nearly everyone, except a few who will always have something to complain about.

Let's keep it very simple and limit it to a healer, a damage and a tank kind of character. There are much more use cases obviously, but please forgive me limiting it to these 3 for the sake of this example. If you were able to max out all 3 of these, you are practically unstoppable. This is only really critical in PvP scenarios. As I said, the goal is to make it fun for as many people as you can, not just a few who have the time to grind for months to max out all their skills. If players can, they will destroy the game experience for others.

All I'm trying to tell you is that things are not always as simple as they seem if you factor in all the factors a game development company that wants to make a living has to consider.

As some have also noticed, the article author obviously didn't mean to offer solutions. The MMO development work is too complex for anyone to give a complete solution. Everyone has to make their own experiences. And for me it was an entertaining read and well written. ;)

Originally posted by syntax42

You make it sound more complex to make a MMO than it really is.

Um.   Speaking as a developer, Shannon Drake's description is spot-on, and I for one really appreciate him taking the time to share such an accurate, humor-laden, description of what really happens in typical development.

Lol i loved this article all so true and funny