Timesink: Why MMOs Take So Long
MMORPG.com contributor Shannon Drake has been in and around the game development business for a while now and today begins his journey of answering the question: Why exactly does developing an MMO take so long when the final product doesn't always seem perfectly polished?
General Article By Shannon Drake on July 27, 2010
The problem with creating an MMO is that you're constructing a world, with all that implies, and it requires accounting for everything under the sun. Unless there's two suns, or no suns, or eight suns, or a combination of suns and moons, and what would that do to gravity, to daylight, to the religions on the planet... Part of the reason for the legendarily long development timeline is this world building, bringing a coherent world with rules and people and a history out of the aether of the design document.
Before a game goes into production, there's usually a preproduction stage where a bunch of designers and various folk start wrestling a mishmash of ideas into a design doc, planning the server architecture and setup, and otherwise trying to turn "Let's make a game" into an actual game.
In some ways, this is the most exciting part of the enterprise as ideas fly around, systems pop up and are trashed in seconds, and the game begins to take shape. And in some ways, it can be the most frustrating once actual production begins, because few plans survive impact with actually having to make the thing.
Once milestones and budgets are set, the dreaming is over and the harsh reality begins. It turns out instead of endless weapons, we have the time and resources to animate and skin about 50 weapons. That cool feature we mentioned is impossible because it might take 3 years and might never work properly. We can't actually do endless amounts of content because we don't have the time, budget, and expertise to come up with procedural content generation and user-generated content is still early enough that no one feels confident enough to build it into our game.
Before the game even enters widespread production, these first compromises have to be made, unless the project is one of those mad genius productions where three or four people make the game of their dreams for love or otherwise have a source of funding allowing them to tinker endlessly. As models go, it's not a bad one, the depths and complexity of projects like Dwarf Fortress or A Tale in the Desert have proven a small or one-man team can survive off a rabid community, donations, enthusiasm, and persistence, but their prospective audience is also much smaller, meaning the potential return on investment is much lower.
For example, the entirely skill-based game is a holy grail for many old school gamers, but let's walk through a shortened version of a conversation that I've had regularly.
How do we keep everyone from taking everything? We put a cap on the number of skills you can max. Okay, but aren't most people just going to figure out the best skills and do those or, alternately, do a bit of everything and be aggressively mediocre? Okay, we'll award bigger bonuses/more power/whatever to people who specialize, but still allow anyone to take anything. So, someone who specializes at the high end will blow away anyone who doesn't specialize? Yes. So didn't we just make it a class-based game at the high end? Okay, we'll put in diminishing returns for those who specialize. Now isn't everyone back to being mediocre to good with a few lunatics at incredible?
At this point, someone jumps out of a window.
That's not to say skill-based games are bad, but it depends on the goals for the game and the anticipated playerbase, as well as how much time you want to spend balancing. Balancing for something with rigid classes is hard enough, but balancing, say, "swords" to let the guy starting out with 1 in swords have fun and the guy with 1,000,000 in swords have fun is a nightmare, especially because everything you put in the game has to be treated as if it's a completely fleshed out path, not just a complementary skill, because someone will inevitably use it all the time.
Let's take "Shields" as a generic example. In a classless-style game, if you allow players to equip two shields, some of them inevitably will. If you only give "shields" a few attacks--reasoning there's only so much you can do with a shield and they're mostly for defensive purposes--a portion of your playerbase will inevitably complain. Why would you allow us to dual-wield shields if you were only going to give them a few lame attacks? Of course, if you make only one usable at a time, you're creating drama because you've restricted our choices and it's not supposed to be that kind of game! If I want to dual-wield shields, then by god, I should be able to, and I swear I won't complain if there's only a few attacks.
That's not to say that a class-based game is much easier. So, you've got a choice between the guy who drops meteors on people and the guy that gives them a Band-Aid and a pat on the back. The game is still in the concept phases and we have a shortage of healers. Can we make the healer cooler, maybe give them a weapon of some kind? Okay, so, now everyone will play the healer because they can fight and heal. Well, let's make them not as good at fighting and maybe they can only self-heal so much at a time and we'll make the other fighters cooler. Actually, philosophically speaking, should healers be able to melt faces or should they just be healing all the time? That sort of seemingly innocuous question can derail an afternoon or a month and lead to a wholesale redesign of a class or even the entire class system.
On the content side, the big, fun stuff like coming up with a world background and cool monsters is the relatively easy part. Everything else takes time, because literally everything has to be considered.
Take barrels. What does a barrel look like in this world? Are there--should there be--more than one style? If so, does each race/side/whatever have its own unique barrels? How big should they be? Should players be able to move them? If so, what do we do to keep them from setting up a wall of barrels to block a door or otherwise be annoying? If not, how are we going to explain that players can just wander through big heavy barrels? Should we explain it? Should we ignore it? Is anyone going to care? After all, somebody will inevitably complain that the Bunny Snugglers would probably have a snuggly barrel while the Bad Dudes would have one covered in black leather and spikes, but will enough people care to make it affect sales?
Or take something like a bookshelf. "It's a bookshelf. Books. Shelf. Doodads." True. But the Mechano-civilization of Shprockets the Steampunk Robot probably doesn't shop at Ikea, so someone has to sit down and figure out what a robot bookshelf looks like. What kind of books would a robot have? Would a robot even need books? Should we have "punchcard shelves" instead? Does anyone know what a punchcard is? Why would robots read, anyway? And then someone chimes in that if the robots don't have bookshelves in their robot house, a bunch of people will eventually complain about the lack of bookshelves in the robot house when everybody else gets bookshelves.
For quests, there's the not-inconsequential matter of simply writing hundreds of them, then scripting, testing, and fixing them, and that's not taking into account giving them coherent storylines, animating NPCs with any particular emotes, making players feel useful, and otherwise making them more than rote exercises in pushing the lever and giving the pellet. Then there's a debate that always comes up: Do players actually read them enough to care? Is it worth putting in enough work to make them tell coherent stories when most people will mash Accept, then follow an arrow to the exact point they need to hit? My answer is always the same, the people who do care will sell the game to the people that don't, but the debate can be quite vigorous.
While I don't play a lot with the technical side of things the essential gist of it is: So, we need you to build us a system made of thousands of servers covering the game, billing, web services, back-end database, and all of it needs to have as close to 100% uptime as humanly possible because for every second it is down our playerbase will hurl itself upon the rocks of our forums, email, phone support, and other CS avenues screaming dire threats at the top of their lungs until the connection is restored. Also, hundreds of thousands of people need to be able to log in at once, play constantly, and not even notice that they're connected to a server hundreds or thousands of miles away from them. And you need to ensure there's as little lag as possible, not that it matters, because people will still complain about lag when they're trying to play The God King of Video Card Killers on Grandma's Wal-Mart Laptop. Have fun!
Was fun to read ^^ Humans are just humans , they cant help themself being jerks ^^
Maybe make a new jerk mmorpg ( not referring to anything sexual orientated ) ... who knows maybe it is the next WoW xD
That was a wonderful article! Very well thought out and presented.
Very interesting and informative article. At the end you should have something about 'then come the ad/marketing people who do know anything about games but sell it to stores, web sites, customers, etc'.
Wow, great article. Interesting read. One of the better ones I've read here in recent history.
Thank youn for the article. I enjoyed reading it :-)
And at the the end of that the mmo market is very saturated. Definitely reinforces the "long-term" in development.
Definitely one of the best - and funniest - articles here in recent memory. Now pardon me while I go clean the coffee off my monitor...
RE: people will still complain about lag when they're trying to play The God King of Video Card Killers on Grandma's Wal-Mart Laptop.
... that's now about 5 years old.
Great article. This should be a "must read" for those who think devs write "sucky games" just because we hate players.
Awesome article.. The comments about jumping out a window and choking the griefer were well timed! :)
Great article.
I truly laughed at the described griefing.
Brought back memories :-).
Great article, everyone should be reading this, doesn't matter if you're a developer or a gamer or a trolling crybaby griefer.
Iam wondering who Shannon Drake is and why she/he(were in the interweb) is so pissed off.
Thats what i get outa this anyways.
This article is pretty much based on the assumption that everyone imagine a MMO in a "WOW world". How about some objectivety?
Whoever wrote this, got my atteantion for all the wrong reasons.
Someone at MMORPG.com should write a server-side AI routine that automatically links this article whenever the argument about "OMG BUGGZ!" vs "Its still beta, moron" comes up. It could start by keying on variants of the phrase "Well I work for a software company and I know..."
In other words, a great article explaining the realities of any large-scale gaming project.
It felt both sad and nostalgic reading this article. Thanks, I enjoyed it, and the perspective it will hopefully give some of the people out there who seem to think developers are simply people who want to tick off their playerbase.
The best ones are when new content or a new game releases everyone is level 1, the first thing you hear is omg the lag, *the company* should have put good new servers in instead of these ancient slow things so we can play. A week or 2 later the whole place is empty, and people complain that they are wasting servers on old outdated areas.
Go figure.
Yes, a very good article indeed. It's a great insight into how "you" (or "we" in my perspective) totally aggravate, annoy, and just plain confuse the development teams.
Actually, I think you're the only one making that assumption. As one that has played a myrid of MMO's I would never make that leap that every MMO is based on the "WoW World" design (albeit I have no problem with that design, as appearently many do). I believe her/his point was that overall MMO's development takes time. Irregardless MMO they all of the game mechanics, world design, storyline design (lore in some MMO's), race/culture design, etc., etc., etc.
See she/he wasn't POed, she/he was just stating facts. Things the end user ( you and I), never see. So, she/he was a lot more objective than you give them credit for.
I just lost IQ points reading this dribble, there are so many holes you could shoot a shotgun at it from 50 feet away and not notice any new ones and not to mention the obvious but unless the servers arent on earth, they arent hundreds of thousands of miles away its impossible.
crimino ergo sum ,)
If there are no complaining customers and no player griefing happens, then how can you claim you got customers? Interesting read, but unfortunately that doesn't only apply to the gaming industry.
On the other hand I've been let down a few times by some publishers/development studios. Publishing some unfinished product, burying it because it was a financial disaster. In those cases they could at least make it open source so someone could more easily bugfix or adapt it to personal taste (even if only for private use). But I'm dreaming again and copyright laws will strike back. :(
I thought it was a good article. You should post some of those "holes" that you see.
Also, the author said "hundreds OR thousands of miles away" not "hundreds OF thousands of miles away."
Missed the hyperbole, did you?
I'm also curious what "holes" you see here, being that you are, I would assume, an expert in video game development.
Fantastic article! Well-written, very informative and astute, and made me smile all the way through. I look forward to more, Shannon ^^
Nice article. Wonderful read. Keep up the good work.
good read and so true!
It was a good article. A light read that didn't take a lot of time to figure out. This is how some sitcoms on TV should play out. Has truth in it, but it isn't making fun of anyone and everyone at the same time. Classic!
Nice article! Not entirely original in content, but very original in delivery. Made me LOL. More like this please!
That said, you do tend to focus on a couple of the larger beefs I have with the MMO industry as a whole, and the shells the designers have created around themselves. Seems like a couple of these could be solved by thinking outside the box - that is, NOT thinking like a game designer/developer when approaching specific problems. For instance, regarding skill-based systems, why on God's green Earth do developers implement skill-based systems and then even TRY to balance them for 1 on 1 PvP? Why do that to yourself and your player base? If the game is designed around that (like Tekken or Street Fighter) then fine, but as an example, in the case of SWG pre-CU (because now the game is thoroughly irrelevant), people were complaining of imbalanced skill sets between combat classes. Big deal. The premise was Star WARS, meaning large group battles. Yeah they still screwed it up with Combat Medics which were true nukes, but that was easy to solve with a couple well-placed nerfs.
Bottom line, if fighters can always beat wizards which can always beat clerics which can always beat fighters, how is that different from group roles (which I find equally abhorrent, but we'll never escape from because it's far too cheap to implement)? Why should you balance so any two classes always always always have an exactly equal chance? That seems entirely too politically liberal.
Perhaps it is time to start offloading some of the development to players?
There are a lot of people out there who love to build worlds but don't have the funds to hire a studio to implement their imagination.
Class balance.... because everything and everyone should be the same cause we have to please everyone....
The state that MMO's are in today is because everyone thinks they know what and how a game should be made and cry because this is not the case.
While an MMO might start out good, once people start complaining and developers start to change it so that those complaining get what they want is when the game starts going down the toilet. I am not saying don't listen to your playerbase, I am saying don't give them every single thing they want because even if you do they will find something else to cry about the following day.
Awesome post! I learned a lot too. :D
Another article about how players are jerks and developers need to be treated better. Do we forget so easily that we give them money for the games on top of paying to keep playing it? If they want us to cut them some slack then make the games cheaper.
Who said anything about the players being jerks? Oh, the players did. Devs didn't worry about how feature X could be abused until someone did abuse and another person whined.
What a great read! So funny and so true!
I have been playing since the days of Gemstone III and have seen examples of your griefer mentality in almost every game I have played.
I remember in UO a guy that somehow hacked an insta kill command. He was without a doubt the king of all griefers. Same game, two guys would block a pass and kill you as you tried to get past.
Then there was the guy in WoW who had a speed hack in Warsong Gulch. He capped the flag 3 times in under a minute, lol.
Excellent article.
Insightful, humorous... and managed to address or at least acknowledge just about every aspect of the typical MMO community at large.
Love the bit about grinding non-stop 'til you pass out to "beat the game", only to complain about a lack of content. How many times I've pointed out the behavior to people who were doing just that... trying to 'beat the game' at the expense of ignoring most of the content along the way.... then blaming the developers for it.
I also am waiting for your contribution to this great article : come on, dont be shy, share your godlike knowledge. What are those holes, comment them and propose suggestions, we're all listening, oooooo sensei...
Excellent article, i enjoyed reading it, and very informative. Thank you.
I move to submit Shannon as God of MMORPG.COM articles.
Honestly, this is the best article i've read on this site in the better part of 6 months. She detailed exactly what i've been trying to say about skill based games and why they really don't work except for a very specific subset of the MMO playerbase. She talked about tons of design elements that people bitch about game companies doing or not doing.
It just amazes me, because if most of the playerbase had any ability towards reasoned thinking, they would have been able to figure a lot of this out themselves. Of course then you have the people who you can show the utter truth of a situation to, and they still will say "i dont care, make it happen or i will continue whining!"
Anyways, kudos to Shannon.
Loved it!
Intelligent and witty. Excellent read. Keep up the good work!
He/She?..really? Take half a second to read a Bio. Enjoyed the article. Give this guy more assignments.
Yeah, good to read and full of truth.
But its no excuse for not implementing basic features that are long known in their effects into a new game.
That is why experience is so much worth - you know what will happen and you can early on steer a feature around to much misuse.
You know when to ignore your Testplayers / PLayerbase and when to listen.
Its your Job...
PS: Yeah, never tell them to be ignored, flat out lie about...^^
Honestly, devs should stick to their guns more. Don't listen to the whiners.
The people that will play the game, will play the game. If they do not like it, they are free to GTFO. Find something you like.
Drop the balance crap. Make every skill set dependent on another skill set for survival, and you will not have 200k of the same elite skill set running around.
Make it a player world, not a world with players.
1) I liked the Article.
2) Some of it was kindof... for lack of a better word... silly. (Not the funny kind of silly. More like the "...what? Um...okay..." silly.
3) This quote "Stradden: 'Missed the hyperbole, did you?
I'm also curious what "holes" you see here, being that you are, I would assume, an expert in video game development.'"
is rather unprofessional. I agree there are a few holes in there, and not everyone is going to like this article for realistic reasons. We as humans need to realize that our written work may not be perfect for various reasons.
I see holes as well. Quite a few. Some insignificant, some face-palming. Overall it's a great article (whoever write it and proof-read it did a great job). It is fun and silly (the funny kind) which is another big plus. But at times it provides poor examples. Very poor examples. "Poor enough" where it will lead some readers to question the author's point's validity.
I will provide three examples or "holes" and my response.
The first "hole":
"Take barrels. What does a barrel look like in this world? Are there--should there be--more than one style? If so, does each race/side/whatever have its own unique barrels?"
As an indie game developer, I find this example face-palming. Without a big budget, there is no need or possibility to include more than just one barrel. And that's only if that barrel has a use! It slightly frustrates me as a developer that big-shot (or any serious developer) would ask this question about barrels when there is so much more attention needed in every other aspect of a video game. What a waste of time! As an anticipated reader of this potentially informative and intelligent article, I am disappointed that there was not a better example that would actually apply to me and give me better foresight into the REAL questions developers ask which actually have relevance even to the small or young future-developer who may be extremely interested in this article.
The second "hole"
Player Complaining about Insiginificant Issues. Honestly...who cares? If a player complains about something as (pardon my french) stupid as "Why am I not allowed to Dual Wield two Shields offensively?" then any intelligent developer should quickly sigh and remind themselves not to waste their time reading full-sentences from children. It's common sense that if you equip two defensive weapons that you will be gimped. The fact the system allows it is cool enough for most people to say "It's that cool! Of course, no one would want to but the fact is you CAN!"
Or if a player complains about something as insignificant as "Why aren't there more bookshelves in this room!?" their voice is so tiny why even waste your time? In essence, the examples provided about players complaining consist mostly of what would account to trolls and children spouting irrelevant complaints that have nothing to do with what really matters: the game.
It is NOT that these players don't make good points. Libraries should have bookshelves. If there's a possibility to dual-wield shields it WOULD be cool to use them efficiently. But developers do not have time for this sort of drivel. There are far, far, FAR more important details and aspects of video games which need attention instead. As a PLAYER, I am always frustrated to the point of quitting MMORPG's because of Developer's focus on petty minor features while they ignore the massive gaping hole which is bleeding their subs. Something as simple as "Stop overpowered [Ability 12] from killing players in 2 hits when combat is supposed to last for 100 hits!" Not "barely overpowered" abilities in WoW. No, I mean GAME-STOPPING, GAME-BREAKING overpowered abilities like Champions Online was plagued with at launch.
I am not talking about "my opinion" as to what the developers should work on. I am speaking of what the majority of (quitting) players overwhelmingly agree upon is the major downfall of the game. Whether that is extremely poor performance (Vanguard) or game-breaking bugs, exploits, or unbalanced powers. I am not talking about Trammel/Felucca or PRE -CU SWG. At least those developers tried something to fix the major problems. Unlike some developers who ignore the real problems who the MAJORITY of players scream about. Not barrels. Not bookshelves. Not dual-wielding asinine items.
The third "hole" would be:
"So I can just invite them into my group by telling them I want to give them some gold, then lock up their computers spamming heals."
At this point, someone usually has their hands wrapped around his throat."
Which of course is my fault, as I guess I missed the joke in this one. It was funny, but at the same time I wonder if developers really do sit around tables being more than just trouble-shooters-- if they actually make massive game-changes based around stuff as simple as the fact the above example is ridiculous.
I guess I missed the joke because it isn't a logical jump to assume that both spamming particle effects AND/OR sounds will lock up a computer. Sounds often don't, and are simply just not played :P But even if they both *somehow* did, sometimes it's more important to focus on other aspects than a very, very, very abstract example of an ultimate reality that players WILL be able to annoy others. That is actually what make the games fun! The fact the developers have solved it ENOUGH to where a player has to lie, deceive, and invite someone into a group with trickery is enough to deter most of the problems. Afterall, most players will learn to /disband the moment someone starts spamming that ability. Players will get warned, reported, or banned. And after many months of focusing on REAL issues, this will probably eventually be resolved in a very, very, very small patch.
Excellent article! This should be required reading for all gamers.
I am a jerk!
Thumbs up for the Dwarf Fortress nod. First reference of the year.
Finally a good article on mmorpg. Very well done.
In regards to the "easy to use" (including intuitive), there is a thing called developer eyes. You know what it's suppose to do, you wrote the code or fiddled with the results for a while so you believe it is obvious. This is a reason why it's important to include in your early alpha tests people who are not familiar with your type of games. It gives you important feedback from an outsiders point of view.
The early design phase is the most fun in my experience. But everyone wants to go to the party, but nobody wants to clean up afterwards. It's not just games that experience changes in the approach to a problem. Sometimes a few trial and errors can be done to see how the performance in the real world work out.
Balance is a tricky thing thing. There is a poster on mmorpg.com, wjrasmussen, who lives near me, who talks about it. It's easy to add a number of different weapons to a game and then create a new skill for each of +10% dps. In an open skill system, how do you balance a +10% DPS vs a skill to increase movement speed? What about synergy (2+2=5)?
One thing I hope everyone who comes to forums demanding features from devs should see from this article is how limited resources are and the fact you have budgets and schedules to meet. Something that sounds easy doesn't always work or even fit into the rest of the system.
Finally, I hope Shannon take the time to write a few more articles for mmmorpg.com. We need it!
Absolutely love this article really fun reading it.
What a load of bollox if you ask me.
sure, these kind of scenario's might have happened around the time of Ultima online, but ffs, give us a break dude, Succesfull and unsucesfull MMO's have been coming and going for decades now. You really expect us to beleive that they go through all these primative dumb questions and answers?
Humans learn from experience, maybe students studying the subject might find this interesting, but look at Tera online, they have Devs on there from nearly every mmo ever made, lol. I think by now they understand whats wanted and whats not.
Great peice ancient history Doc, but give it to daniel jackson, we're interested in modern and future days. I dont buy any of this.
Great Article, makes you realise sometimes we as gamers can be a bit to rash, and forgetful of the big picture. BUT, it seems to me that all these problems the developers are facing, they may have brought the majority upon themselves. If they made games they loved or thought would be fun and made them for gamers, not been greedy and making them for the masses casuals and the unwashed. Instead of catering for anyone and everyone, do it for those that matter, gamers. The more you try to please the less pleased people will be. It really struck me that most of these problems would be solved by heading back to how they made games in the old days. When the jerkwads ect were not as prevelant, because community and reputation meant something. just a thought.
This, was the god of all blogs! THe mother of all articles! :D Very interesting read and good points!
Except He said hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Very good article.
This was an entertaining read. *smiles*, With all due respect, I think you are ok but this article was complete pile of deception on your part. I hardly believe you spent any real time in the game development industry. Its too much based on generalizations and opinions. There are no facts here, just hypotheticals and opinions.
Your blog entry reminds me of my first two weeks when I took a course called "Software Engineering" which explains all of this and your elaboration, makes me wonder if you are starting a CS major and trying to show off what you've learned.
Game companies spend their time deciding what to do, and the idea today is that everyone wants their own MMO since they can generate money from monthly subscription fees. Everyone wants to cash in on Blizzard's success.
I remember running my own MMORPG Private Server and modded it across several systems. 8000 Registered, 2000 who usually played simultaneously. If I was commercial, and charged $15 a month, I would generate the following results on just 8000 players :)
8000 players x 15 dollars = $120,000/month (monthly fee Generation)
120K x 12 = 1.44 million generated/yearly
8000 players x 50 (cost of a new game) = $400,000
I was running the server with 1000x more exp and 500% drop rate. People loved it more than official servers due to the fact I only required $400 a month for connection maintanance, system mantainance and paying electric bills. By a donation system, I was always able to get $600 - $700. I always took care of people and ran a team in-server. People loved that it wasn't a grind fest and in a short time their characters reach a point where they can "JUST PLAY"...
Now Imagine millions! The idea is not to let them have fun but to believe they are having fun and that fun comes from "HARD WORK" and burning time away, spanning months and people call that being HARDCORE..
MMORPGs are great in private server where its not about syphoning money from you, but in official servers to most games...They have been horrible. The exception is Guild Wars where the team that made it did not design it around a monthly subscription model allowing people to "Just Play."
You want to talk about the design process....For the last 10 years, MMORPGs have had the same Four to Five types of NPC quests rehashed in a 1000 different ways. Almost any game you play at the end of the day, it always comes back to one of these quests where your character is just a window into the world and as a character is just an emptyshell.
A lot of people use "Divide and Conquer" Logic in problem solving and it is one of the most effective things. I am not ranting on about the "military strategy" of getting factions to attack one another and then your faction destroys the one remaning. No, I mean "Divide and Conquer" logic.
Divide and Conquer means to solve a large problem by breaking the problem down into two or more smaller version of the same problem. It is a fundamental part of logic theory and design. I know people will argue amongs each other but in a room filled with programmers working on making games, Divide and Conquer has been used in many places to solve LARGE problems....Not just computer sciences.
Information itself and its organization and distribution is a DIVIDE AND CONQUER problem :)
Really great article! Thanks!
Wow a lot of people seem to ahve mised the poit of the article here
It was a good article and it shows soe of the problems when it comes to making a world to play in. A bit of advice to those who didnt like it. you are not meant to take the examples seriously. Those examples are just exaduated examples of what thought processes go through soeones head when they are creating a world in there heads.
I should know i sometimes write stories for my local writers club, and it sounds very similar to what i go through to.
I dunno, but reading the article made me sad. Why are people that mean? I mean, hurling other players from heights or stalking or making a game crash... I never ever in my life had an urge to do that. You don't even know or see the people you grief. I can't for the world imagine why someone would be so bad.
Good article BTW Shannon D... but I agree with Angel2070 post.
If I like a game enough I will either upgrade or buy a new computer... if I have a crap computer I know turning the visual effects and sound features off is a must... gamers been doing this for years.
Complaints about damage on dual wielding shields!!?!? Those would be the little kids because a smart gamer would know how to use this to thier advantage ... I would have some kind of "damage shield effect" imbued to my shields so when im attacked by DPS (or my melee) I would have the upper hand... or even a DoT effect... I wouldnt care about more skills if im killing everybody
Report bad gamers! Bad gamers have been around forever and they will never go away. The /follow comand is wonderful... but you cant trash it because of a few bad apples. (I know it was an example... im just saying)
Its not the article... its the dev ... HIRE ME ILL FIX EVERYTHING!!!
I have to agree with Hyperion, while most of us understood the tongue in cheek manner in which this article was written, some folks seem to be taking it far too literally.
I'm sure the discussions described have happened on countless occasions in the past and will continue in the future, because for most of the scenarios, there is no single, right answer depending on many factors, not the least being size of budget/staff, desires of the designers and player tastes.
The article does a decent job of showing how certain things work in creating a game and explains in part how sometimes certain defects, exploits, grief mechanics can end up in a game.
Sure, many times its a clean miss, but sometimes it really does come down to players doing something to thwart the intended game mechanics.
I recall one of my first MMO's, Lineage 1 there was a mechanic in place for a player to drop a piece of equipped gear or backpack item if they died in game. Since some items were very costly it really hurt to lose your sword of whoop arse.
Players quickly figured out that if they stuffed their 96 slot backpack with useless (and light, because weight mattered there) items such as candles, the changed the drop odds signicantly in their favor, with candles being the usual item lost in most cases. This isn't what the dev's intended, and eventually they made candles stackable (they previously were a 1 candle per slot item) but that just made players switch to some other object such as junk lightweight cloth armor items.... the game continued ad infinitim.
I enjoyed the article, in fact, was one of the better ones here lately, but I wasn't reading it with the expectation of receving some divine revelation in proper game design, I just wanted an entertaining read.
Let me clean something up here
Earlier post: (I know it was an example... im just saying) By Truelevel
Excellent read.
It is true that mmo's are a huge undertaking and require lots of Q&A and trial and error and time, but what really matters is how efficiently the developers respond to problems. How quickly they can react to make things right, instead of just making them gone.
After all, the years of development mean nothing if 1 month into the game, the population hates the developer because of lack of fixes and communication regarding the fixes.
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.
Your post confuses me. I don't see any point that you're trying to make.
You say the article is too based in hypotheticals. Were any of the conclusions of the article incorrect in your opinion?
You mentioned your experience running a private server. Do you believe this is a model for MMORPG designers and publishers to follow somehow? Don't you realize that the money to develop and market the game that attracts people to your private server would not exist if the investors were not promised the kind of returns that come from money siphoning? I think an example that was not codependent with the money siphoning you denounce would have made the point that MMOs can be successful without that business model.
What, specifically, is the problem you believe should be divided and conquered? Do you have any suggestions on how to divide it?
I have no doubt that you have some great things to say, but I don't believe you've actually said any of them.
In Reference to the Article
Thank you for this article, it was very insightful, even if the examples weren't 'real' examples. I really like the way you described the challenge for 'starry eyed developers' when the rubber meets the road. I've had plenty of in the know people say 'that can't be done' or 'it costs too much' or whatever, but having it described HOW it costs too much gives me a chance to come up with something. Just the fact that procedural generation takes some unique expertise (and costs more time/money?) is worth the time it took to read the article.
That said, it does also work as an explanation on why MMOs are in such a rut, creatively. Not only has the current way of thinking been min/maxed, more or less, but there is no demand for something different from the player base, people do just want to play WoW in new skins...
Heh, grandma's wal-mart laptop. Was a good read.
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.
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. ;)
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