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JeffL	Don't want to hurt anyone's feelings but... General Discussion « Star Sonata 7/28/09 5:49:03 PM For anyone who had problems with lag before, I just want you all to know that we've upgraded our server to use Amazon's cloud computing and the lag is really a thing of the past. We're smoking on an 8 core instance with our database split out three ways and distributed. Also, we're getting closer to releasing Star Sonata 2. You can see information and videos about it here: www.starsonata2.com
JeffL	Fees General Discussion « Star Sonata 6/16/08 12:21:51 PM No, once you pay and go over level 20, you have to be a current subscriber to play. Otherwise someone could pay for a month, power level up to level 100 and then stay as a free-to-play level 100 forever.
JeffL	Fees General Discussion « Star Sonata 9/18/07 4:36:52 PM There are a lot of things to do while level 20 and under. We have some people who have played free for 3 years.
JeffL	Fees General Discussion « Star Sonata 9/12/07 5:35:52 AM It is $9.95 per MONTH, not week, and you can also subscribe with a buy 3 months, get the 4th free deal.
JeffL	Question about Subscription General Discussion « Star Sonata 9/12/07 5:25:16 AM It costs $9.95 per month or you can choose a sign up deal that gives you 4 months for the price of 3.
JeffL	Play this game! General Discussion « Star Sonata 8/21/07 1:31:49 AM Yeah, I think our game play is excellent. Now we have hired a contractor to make a new front end with better graphics. After all, flashy graphics are just a technical challenge and anyone can make good graphics if they put in the time. Game play is the really tough part to get right.
JeffL	Show your intent to try! General Discussion « Star Sonata 8/21/07 1:18:31 AM Go Hellspreader. =)
JeffL	An Ode to SS General Discussion « Star Sonata 8/21/07 1:16:22 AM It's because the OP posted a link on our forum, I believe.
JeffL	Sci-Fi and Alternate Character Slot Ideas MMORPG Game Concepts « Developers Corner 7/27/07 7:02:31 AM Interesting idea. One thing to watch out for is a game mechanic that requires people to spend time on several alts in order to have a competitive main or crew. At that point, the alts wouldn't really be alts, it would just be that your crew is really the same as a character in any other game.
JeffL	The Money Problem Economics « Developers Corner 6/19/07 5:03:22 PM lol - that's how it is now, but none of the players at all want universe resets, so we end up having to dictate arbitrary resets instead of letting one team create the reset as originally designed.
JeffL	The Money Problem Economics « Developers Corner 6/19/07 2:34:46 PM Communal survival is an interesting idea. In my game, we have to have periodic universe resets to clear out the universe and we re-randomize a new one. It keeps things fresh and interesting, but the players generally dislike it because they all have economies and bases that they've set up and have already explored the map. One thing I was thinking about adding is alien invasions, where each day or two there is a big spawn of aliens who try to kill everything they see and make their way to the center of the universe. If they make it, then the universe would be reset, which the players want to fight, but each successive spawn will be more powerful than the last so the aliens are destined to win eventually. The thought is that the players will band together to fight each incoming wave to try to preserve the universe.
JeffL	The Money Problem Economics « Developers Corner 6/19/07 7:30:23 AM "In the real world, money represents work. I work x amount of hours for y amount of dollars. Therfore, 1 dollar is worth some measure of time spent working." This is false. Marx was wrong, no reason to repeat his mistakes. Only if everyone is equally productive does money represent work. The fact is that people are not. Money represents production and the value of production is strictly contextual and can not be measured in hours worked or costs involved. If I need a particular service, I am willing to trade a certain amount of my time (in the form of money I've accumulated) in exchange for that service, but I don't care how long it takes another person to perform it. I am ambivolent between hiring one guy who will take 10 hours or another who will take 5 or yet another who is very smart and can do it in 10 minutes because of some invention of his. What matters is production, and all I care about are the results, not the sweat that went into it. "heavy inflation is inevietable in anything other than the most simplistic and heavily regulated representations of an economy" I don't think this is the case. Didn't UO have heavy deflation as goods became more and more rare? I believe the inflation is more dependent on a closed economy vs. a faucet-sink economy. But even in a faucet-sink economy, if there are enough faucets and enough sinks, then an equalibrium in prices and money supply should be reached eventually. Anyway, do you really think people want to play a mmorpg where mere survival is the goal? That is what we do outside the game. In the game, we want to explore, socialize, kill, or become all powerful and achieve an efficacy we can't in the normal world.
JeffL	Highly customizable skills??? MMORPG Game Concepts « Developers Corner 6/19/07 7:06:42 AM I think that from a programming, graphics, and interface standpoint, it's quite doable. I designed a component based magic system on paper that would work kind of like this. Basically, all you need is components that can be programmed so that they can be combined in any combination. For magic, if each spell has a delivery method, effect, and modifier, and you had 10 delivery methods, 10 effects, and 10 modifiers, that would give you 1000 different spells. I would think other skills could be modularized in the same way, for example, a delivery method, effect, and modifier for a melee combat skill might be punch + stuns opponent + takes extra time. But on further reflection, while a system like this might sound really cool and powerful for players, I think you would lose a lot of flavor. When there are only a handful of skills or spells compared to the literrally millions that could be made up of a modular system, each spell or skill has a flavor and is easily recognizable. It creates part of the lore of the world that you're in. In WoW, if you see ice raining down from the sky, you might think, "Cool a Blizzard", and have some idea about what's happening. But if you saw the same thing in a modular system, you would see the delivery, but maybe ice looks a lot like wind blasts or psycic blasts from afar, so can't tell exactly what it is, and certainly can't tell what any modifier is. Also, unlocking new components in a modular skill/spell system might not give the same sort of excitment as you get in a more limited system. If you can already do an area affect attack with ice raining down from the sky, are you going to be that much more excited when you unlock fire and can do an area attack with fire raining down from the sky? Or if you can make ice rain down from the sky already, are you going to be that excited about also breing able to shoot ice in a cone, make ice shoot out from you in any direction, make ice come up out of the ground, etc. etc. My fear is that in a system where there are millions of combinations, each one only a hair different from 1000 others, things would get bland very quickly. You would have a very interesting and cool simulation, but a good game is much more than a simulation.
JeffL	Star Sonata-GREAT Game! A must have! Role Playing Discussion « General Discussion 6/15/07 11:01:19 PM As a developer of Star Sonata, I want to go on record and say that the gameplay of Star Sonata is very different from the gameplay of Eve. The focus on Star Sonata is much more on building bases, founding colonies, setting up automated trade routes and building and acquiring rare items. Personally, I much prefer the top down view over a first person 3d view because it simplifies the gameplay in a good way while there is still enormous depth coming from your various economic activities and all of the different items and interactions in the game. Basically, it is fairly simple to pick up and extremely rewarding once you do. Our average subscription time is now over 19 months per paying player and continually rising, so that should tell you something, I think.
JeffL	looking for a good game engine Programming « Developers Corner 5/16/07 2:22:28 PM Try looking at Irrlicht, Torque, or Ogre. All either open source or low cost.
JeffL	Free to play with optional subscription MMORPG Game Concepts « Developers Corner 5/08/07 5:03:26 PM My company has found that the free to play, pay for extra content model has worked quite well. While most players who end up paying usually pay within a week of first trying out the game, there are others who will play for months before finally going p2p. But in general, the people who like your game enough to spend hours and hours playing it every week will like it enough to also pay $10 a month or whatever your price point is. Our experience is that at any time, about 1/4 of the players online are f2p and the rest are p2p. The f2p really don't cost much, except potentially opportunity cost if the trial limits were more draconian, and they do give you word of mouth, a more filled world, etc. Originally posted by l2avism Multiple account abuse (botting) - free games offer very few incentives not to bot or keyclone which can consume bandwidth and ruin player experience. (both of which decrease revenue to cost ratios) We have not found this to be a problem. As long as the player base is relatively small, it is not so hard to keep track of what is going on in the game. As it gets bigger, the f2p's get marginalized and there is less they can do compared to the more powerful, higher level p2p's. Keeping abusive players banished - when a player is totally disruptive and nonresponsive to lighter punishments, many games banish an account. With f2p how would you go about keeping them from making a new account and resuming his bad behavior? You could ban his ip, but most players have dynamic ip's and even if they don't its so easy to change an ip address. My only guess is to require a credit card transaction to play of a dollar that is later refunded? This can be a problem sometimes. However, compared to paying players, f2p's will be limited in power, and as far as trading goes, most p2p players know not to trade with f2p's. Plus, IP blocking isn't alway effective, but it's easy and sometimes effective. Much easier to click our "block" button than it is for them to go and create a new mail account to register another f2p. Bandwidth consumption - f2p games can become very popular, but those free players don't contribute to revenues and therefor incur a bandwidth cost you must asorb somehow. In game adds could help a little and as many unoffensive restricions on free accounts your players will tolerate may also help. What about having a separate bandwidth priority for free accounts such as maybe 10 packets in per second? If your game is any good, then as your total player base increases, the number of p2p's will also increase, and hopefully they will generate the revenue necessary to pay for the bandwidth you need. Also, as the player base increase, you can further restrict the abilities or trial length of f2p in order to keep the ratio of f2p/p2p down. Because the more full your world gets, the less you need f2p's to keep it populated. Advertising - a game without substancial revenue cannot afford to advertise to generate revenue (such a viscous cycle). Other possibilities could be using the troll network, who will spam bad and good rantings about my game in every forum know to man. Any publicity is good publicity when you start with no publicity. Happy users are your best advertising. Other than that, unless a certain percentage of players who sign up eventually go p2p, you don't have a business anyway, so you can estimate or guess what it costs to bring in a f2p, and guess what the chance is that he will eventually pay and whether or not advertising is profitable for you. If so, then it will be an investment that costs money upfront but will pay off in the end. As an example, it costs us about $80 in advertising to bring in a new p2p player, but our average subscription length is over 17 months, making that player worth about $136. So, as our budget and player base increases, we increase our advertising budget.
JeffL	Account stealing MMORPG Game Concepts « Developers Corner 4/26/07 7:49:54 PM Originally posted by healz4u The way developers design games we need access to multiple accounts to "do stuff." That is a good point, but of course games are designed this way very intentionally. The game is supposed to be multiplayer, and to encourage and facilitate players working together as groups or guilds we have differentiation among characters. Otherwise you don't get any interesting group dynamics, only "the more the merrier." Likewise, if you allow players to play multiple characters at once with the intent of letting them do anything, it becomes more of a single player game in which multiple people are just playing at the same time, but might not have the same group dynamics that you get with specialization. Thank you for all the responses. A second password for game access or else a secondary password that words like the valet key of a car is a pretty good idea, although, like one poster pointed out, can be difficult to implement in a game that is already 2 years old and has an existing install base. I think I will seriously look into this idea, though.
JeffL	Account stealing MMORPG Game Concepts « Developers Corner 4/26/07 6:19:34 AM I run a small but profitable space MMORPG called Star Sonata, and one of the frequent problems I see in the support mailbox over and over again is account stealing. In spite of a rule I set forth against giving other players access to ones account, people in my game just love to give thier teammates and friends the password to their account so that their friends can either multi-client with the two accounts or perform specialized actions that some character classes can do better than others (such as build colonies, take control of defensive space bases in a system, lay defensive drones, build items, etc.) Over and over I am informed that people's accounts have been "hacked", which means that someone they trusted changed the password and looted everything of value and it's a major pain trying to sort out who is the rightful owner of what. I'm curious, if there is anyone else reading these boards who runs a multiplayer game, 1) do you have this problem, and 2) what sorts of things do you do to prevent it? I believe that Star Sonata may be more susceptible to this sort of thing than other game like WoW because valuable items are much more portable (no soul-binding) and there is a lot of building up of bases and communal system defenses which take specialized characters for maximum benefit which provides a strong incentive for password sharing. Obviously, I could make design decisions to minimize the incentive for this behavior, but it seems a shame to have such considerations factor into design rather than simply considering overall fun and balanced gameplay.
JeffL	Can a new 2d mmo prosper and compete in a 3d age? MMORPG Game Concepts « Developers Corner 4/17/07 1:56:03 PM My game, Star Sonata (www.starsonata.com), has been out for about 2.5 years is profitable. It's an overhead space MMO with the look and feel of Star Control 2. This overhead view may not be the most realistic, but it is accessible and easy to play. I have rarely seen 3d that adds much to gameplay, usually it is adding looks at the cost of clarity. I don't know if a 2d game will ever be a blockbuster again, but there are certainly enough players out there who are looking primarily for gameplay, so I think there will be a sizeable niche for 2d games that are fun and interesting for quite some time.
JeffL	General: Casual Play: World vs. Game... News Discussion « General Discussion 2/16/07 3:29:46 AM I develop for a small sci-fi game called Star Sonata that's been released for just over two years now. The interesting thing is that we started out very much as a "world" much more than a "game". The universe was wide open and totally random. You could build bases anywhere, or nowhere at all. Pretty much you could do whatever you wanted, and all there was to do was wander around, find trade routes, try to make money by a number of different ways so you could upgrade your stuff. The players really drove the content, especially since there were only about 50 active players in the beginning. But as our subscriber base has grown, fixed things that didn't work, added new elements to the game, etc, we have really moved in the other direction. As the universe gets larger and larger to accommodate a growing player base, it can no longer really be totally random. We crafted it so the new players start in easier territories with easier enemies who don't act in their best interest, but act in the interest of making it fun for the newbies. We had to do that, because as the toughest players kept getting tougher and tougher, the toughest NPC's had to keep pace, but they were so far ahead of noobs, artificial separation was required. Same with classes. We started out without classes, just an open skill system. But people wanted classes, so we put in classes and they loved it. It also made the game a little more interesting because it created more diversity in the ways to play Star Sonata. We still have a lot of emphasis on base and colony building, and setting up trade routes for your robotic slaves, so there is still a large Sim City-ish aspect to gameplay which will always be more of a world than a game. But in responding to player demands and just what seems to "work" we seem to be moving farther and farther from the wide open simulation-like universe that we began with.

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