Accountability System for Dynamic World MMOGs

Let’s think about how society holds people accountable for their actions and why. We’re not going to be able to directly model this in a game, but understanding how morality and social structures maintain themselves in real life can provide us with a basis for the mechanical social structure in a game world.

What (most likely) separates human beings from other animals is that we can calculate consciously the affects our actions will have on others. We can conceive of systems to judge actions on a scale beyond our own self-interest. These conceptions are institutionalized through religion and law. Societies dynamically generate and modify moral codes that their members tacitly understand. When there are enough people in the society, institutions arise to enforce moral codes and perpetuate, beyond the scope of the family, certain moral standards.

Accountability and moral agency are tightly bound. If we can be held accountable for our actions, we have the capacity to make moral decisions and be held to moral standards. We want the morality of actions to make a difference in what a player chooses to do when he interacts with others.

Societies in online games take on much of the morality of the real-world society in which the game is played. The effect of morality is deadened significantly in online games, though, leading to plenty of negative, uncooperative behavior that leads to undue pain and suffering.

Active morality promotes social order and cooperation, which, in general, leads to a much better social experience and a more enjoyable gameplay experience. In order for morality to matter in the game world, though, there needs to be accountability. Actions taken against (or with) other players need to have consequences, positive or negative, in order for the morality of those actions to matter to the player. Consequences cannot be enforced by players without knowledge of the precedent action.

Accountability in MMO dynamic worlds is deadened by several factors. Dynamic world games have to mitigate these factors significantly to make accountability work.

1. There’s no way to teach the morals of the game’s society to newbies without them experiencing it. Newbies are given a character that should have a solid understanding of the moral framework, but it’s impossible for the newbie to have that level of understanding.
2. There’s no ultimate punishment in the game world because death has little meaning. This has far-reaching consequences and cannot be overlooked.
3. The cost of abandoning a character and creating a new one isn’t prohibitive. Griefers only lose time when they are forced to make a new character, and those griefers usually have more free time than those who are being griefed.
4. Players don’t play every waking hour, so decisions that may need to be made have to work around when a player is online. The player’s perceptions and actions are limited by how long they spend online—there’s no analog for this in real life.
5. Survival is not a motivator for belonging to social groups. I-game groups are much more ephemeral and the bonds between players are much looser because there aren’t many pressing needs, and no need is as pressing as survival.
6. Membership churns in social organizations. As a result of weaker bonds between players in social groups, a player can jump from group to group at little penalty.

An accountability framework for a dynamic world needs to have several parts:

1. Event capturing and fact collection. The game engine can provide plenty of information about what characters have done. This information can be factually perfect—which is actually better than the general imperfection of information in real life. Collecting data can be difficult in games that have a lot of ambiguous actions available to players, but if players’ actions are relatively well defined, event capturing can lead to a significant increase in accountability.
2. Player aggregation and contextualization of information. Trusted players should be able to take the bare-bones fact sheets generated by the game engine and write histories around them that can be read by other players within the game.
3. Limited information availability. People don’t immediately know all of one anothers’ deeds and misdeeds. A game shouldn’t model this directly, but some gradual information spread depending on player contact and faction contact is necessary.
4. Account-wide activity memory. Because we cannot assume any degree of roleplaying, the moral actor should not be considered the character, but the player. All characters played on the same account should be connected. Activity histories should appear the same for all characters on one account (though there should be some reorganization of the view to allow the activity of the current character to be at the top or highlighted).
5. Give in-game social groups facilities for communicating at all times within the game. This means much more than guild chat. Social groups should have message boards accessible from within the game. There should be something like a wiki that the group can put up to hold important data about itself that its members need to know for the social order to be maintained. Organizational tools are crucial for the promotion of moral and cooperative behavior.
6. Allow social group membership to have a dramatic effect on how a player plays the game. More than simply giving the player a tag beneath their name and a chat channel, guilds should open up a whole new world of coordinated and uncoordinated group activity. When a player joins a new group, she should notice a difference in the way she plays the game every single time she logs on. In this way, group membership can have significance and membership churn can be reduced. Survival can be replaced with raw utility as a motivator for social behavior.

MMOs should make playing with others as smooth and rewarding as possible. In a game world where players can have significant effects on each others’ gameplay, it’s critical that social groups have the tools to invent and maintain morality frameworks to ease cooperation and promote social stability. Without tools to aid tracking and managing accountability, dynamic worlds will continue to breed a disproportionate number of psychopathic characters—such games will always be alluring but, ultimately, socially unstable, exploitable, and brutish.

Accountability is the Currency of Dynamic Worlds

Theme-park MMOs are consequence-free zones—unless you get into the kind of behavior that is against the TOS, but even then the worst punishment is being kicked off the game.  It’s not a problem that theme-parks don’t have serious consequences for player character actions within the game mechanics because no character has an impact on the world. Regardless of what you do (barring some very rare GM-run events) the same mobs will continue to spawn in the same places and the same quests will be done by different people without interruption.

As soon as you give the player the ability to take actions that have far-reaching impact on the experiences of other players, you need to instill a conception of consequence in the player’s mind or face a blight of sociopaths actively ruining the game.

The basic building blocks of dynamic worlds are the actions of the players as they interact with one another and the environment. These actions have meaning in that they change the behaviors or capabilities the environment—both the simulated world and the players that inhabit it. Players need to have feedback from the environment as they interact so that they can learn the rules of interaction and the extent of their own capabilities.

Feedback can be supplied in two ways: in that the players sees what effect his actions have on the world, and in that the player sees how he should feel about that effect.

All games give feedback in the first form. You push on a crate and it moves in the direction you pushed. Simple feedback like this teaches you how to interact with your environment and helps you construct a mental image of tools you can use in further problem-solving endeavors. These rules tend to be too simple in MMOs and this feedback is too minimal, but this feedback’s existence provides the underpinnings for the second kind of feedback.

The second kind of feedback is less common in MMOs. Usually single-player games have NPCs that will react to the player’s actions by interacting with the player differently. The way NPCs react to the player suggests how the player should feel about what they are doing in the world. If the player is behaving badly (in a particular social context), NPCs react with shock, horror, and derision towards the player—the player is supposed to feel this about his actions and adjust them. Because NPCs in MMOs are generally worthless cardboard cutout quest-givers, their reactions have no importance to the player—even though through executing the quest-givers will, the player has interacted with the world in the only way possible in the game, the player doesn’t care about the NPC and skips through quest text. NPCs are just tools used to move forward, to get to the endgame and do the real business the game brags about, be it raiding or PvP.

When the player interacts with other players as his main means of playing the game, either through direct interaction or through effecting a cohabitated world, the tools required to show the player how he should feel about his actions are altered beyond recognition. No longer are NPCs the central focus of the game—players have to make moral judgments about other players. The quality of those judgments has an impact on how much fun each player has.

Through making moral judgments, players establish de facto tribal societies. Once in the context of a society, players behave in regimented, sensible ways while relating to others in their society. The player who acts out will be stripped of his status within the society and will not be able to take advantage of the facilities that society provides, so players are incentivized to conform and contribute. The relations built through this socialization keep players hooked into the game world and happy. PvP is contextualized into society versus society warfare, not meaningless and random killing.

Accountability is at the center of the social and moral systems that form the backbone of player-driven, dynamic worlds. Developers have to provide tools to allow players to hold one another accountable for their actions. Developers need to build tools to track the behaviors of players and reveal important details to other players in appropriate places, building a framework for players to establish crucial trust relationships. By giving players the power to avoid untrustworthy or uncooperative agents, developers can give their players a world where actions have meaningful consequence without the world falling apart into a chaotic mass of criminality and complexity.

Accountability is the social currency of dynamic world MMOs. In order for a player-driven dynamic world to succeed, mechanics must facilitate accountability.

Design Goal: Kill the Boring

When you’re playing a character in a huge 3D world, you want to go to wherever the interesting stuff is happening so that you can have fun. Yes, it’s a trivially true statement, but it lies at the center of many debates in MMO design.

The obvious design decision is to make players walk or ride or float on clouds or fly with their wings (sometimes) through every foot of the world. They have to do this manually, because if they aren’t logged in and staring blankly at their computer screens, bad things must happen.

Bad things must happen, right? Obviously this is the case because no MMORPG allows you to AFK travel. Hell, few MMORPGs allow you to do much aside from various guises of waiting around  (watching progress bars, walking on a safe road, riding on a gryphon, watching your character auto-attack an enemy to death). But what bad things would happen if you let your players skip the boring parts of their character’s lives?

If we’re going to follow the industry-wide pattern of streamlining MMO gameplay, we should take the obvious but oft-overlooked step of allowing the players to be offline or AFK during as many boring or trivial tasks as possible.

EVE Online lets you queue up manufacturing tasks and log off or do something else while they complete. This is an important step towards automation, but a small one. EVE’s mechanics are based around largely non-interactive fundamental activities: combat involves a lot of waiting and gathering is almost entirely non-interactive. In most combat and gathering activities, less than one-third of the player’s time is spent interacting with the game—and those interactions may not actually involve making interesting decisions.

MMOs will be more fun to play if as many boring parts as possible are stream-lined out of gameplay. Keep travel time appropriate so the world can be big, keep production time appropriate so items can have meaning, but don’t make the player pay for this by making them stare at the screen needlessly.

When you’re addicted to an activity, the most intense moments are usually when you desperately want to fulfill the addiction, not when you’re sating your urge. By that logic, it superficially seems that having a lot of dead time your MMO is justifiable. But if we extend the logic further, we have no answer to the question “why must players be logged at all while their character does mundane and boring tasks?” The more time a player spends bored or disinterested in a game, the more boring the game appears. But if being bored in-game is optional (and actually sub-optimal), players won’t stay in your game to be bored—they’ll stick around to do what’s fun and they’ll only remember that your game is fun.

What would you prefer? Four hours spent in-game where only one is spent having fun, or two hours spent in-game where one is spent having fun? MMOs these days lean towards the 1-in-4 ratio.

So why don’t we ditch the boring stuff?

This suggestion is not one that can be implemented with little change to the theme-park model. It requires a rethinking of how MMORPGs engage players. But if the average player is going to put in 1,000 hours of play time, I’d rather have those hours in concentrated bursts of fun lasting around one hour, not in five-hour slogs.

Defining Moderate Simulationism

Simulationism does not mean blind reproduction of real-world processes in a game. I have a more nuanced and objective definition of simulationism. Using this conception, we can better understand what I mean by moderate simulationism.

My approach to moderate simulationism is based on a managerial technique employed to some success among Japanese automakers and subsequently many businesses worldwide: The Five Whys.

Take a look at the high-level mechanics in a game and ask “why”—“why does this work?” or “why did this happen?” After drilling down through consecutive “why”s, you reach a point where you have no other answer but “because the devs say so.” This is the point at which there is no further game-level reasoning: you must step out of the rules themselves to answer this “why.” I call this jump to metagame reasoning a “bottom”. It’s the end of whys that are useful to the player when they’re playing the game. Each time you have a successful answer to a “why” question in a chain, the why-level for the mechanic increases by one.

Gamist systems tend towards metagame reasons taking control almost instantly. The rules in a pure gamist system exist primarily because of metagame reasons—all of the rules do, high and low abstraction layers alike. The perfect simulationist game would allow this chain of whys to proceed all the way until you reach the point you would say “well… I don’t know!” in real life.

In virtual world design (which is the primary concern of just about every single MMO) pure gamist systems fail because the game rules become too arbitrary for the players to suspend disbelief and become immersed in the world. The immersion loss is too great to justify the marginal balance improvements a pure gamist system ensures. Pure gamist virtual worlds do exist, though, in the form modern MMORPGs. There are no pure simulationist MMOs because pure simulationist systems are impossible to implement. Limitations on computing power doom pure simulation. Even if the computing power limitations disappeared, thorough simulations routinely become too complex to program and too complex to play. We don’t even have the means to interact with a computer accurately enough for a simulation of such depth to be feasibly usable.

What, then, is moderate simulationism?

Start with a living virtual world. It doesn’t have to be an accurate simulation of some subset of the real world, but it should be a virtual world that sustains its own operation but changes as different agents interact with it. These agents should be AIs to start. Once you have a self-altering world, you define a set of interaction points at which the player can touch the game world—these interaction points manifest in the player character and its capabilities in RPGs. The way that the player character can interact with the world depends on the parameters of the simulation and the natural conditions that arose as the world evolved under the influence of AI agents. The why-levels of most of the key aspects of the game world will now be significantly deeper than they are in modern theme-park (and even further, sandbox) MMOs, but there is still a bedrock of world design principles that are safely below the why-level of the real world.

(Props go to Tales of the Rampant Coyote’s article on making magic less mundane which helped me to better understand the core of simulationism.)

A Path to the MMO Revolution

Bloggers prattle on about mainstream, big money, big staff, mass-market MMOs. Only there is the stagnation so brutal and the gameplay so monotonous, yet the money is so huge.

But MMOs will not be redefined in this grand marketplace of titans. MMOs will be reiterated—progress has slowed. Now it is no more than a telephone game between big development houses. What developers misinterpret from WoW will guide the changes in the AAA MMO industry, not the visions of luminaries.

When there is (at least the perception of) big money available but a large and risky initial investment is required, market participants will aim to minimize all other risks. World of Warcraft has shown the market the revenue potential of MMOs, but, in the process, it has kicked risk-aversion into a high gear. Investors see WoW’s success and think that only WoW can be so successful, so they should reiterate WoW to capture equivalent numbers. The more deviation from the WoW formula, the more risk. This has slowed MMO evolution to a crawl. WoW is so big, so polished, and so old that other MMOs who aim to duplicate WoW’s success in a high-investment, high-risk environment will inevitably fail.

If you think it’s feasible to compete directly against a game that has 300,000 man-hours  invested (high quality man-hours by some of the best MMO designers and programmers in the industry) and has already captured the market, I have a bridge in Alaska to sell you. It ends abruptly in the Behring Strait. Maybe you’ll be on Deadliest Catch.

How can new devs combat the million-ton behemoth? By being more agile and keeping their eyes open. It also helps to stay as far away from the towering King-Kong-standing-on-King-Kong-in-a-Hitler-disguise as possible.

Agility means being small and quick. Through limiting the scope of projects, experimentation can take root. Developers can rapidly iterate on projects with small scopes, trying new features and honing old ones in the fraction of the time required by a towering monolithic AAA title. Project complexity rises exponentially with respect to the number of modules that must interact. Keep the number of modules small and you can make fairly radical changes without worry about the entire game turning into a flaming pile of debris. This small-and-sharp model for project design can be applied to each module in a game as well. When developers recognize the functional boundaries key modules, they can manage the complexity of module interoperation more efficiently.

Keeping your eyes open ensures that you don’t fall into the traps into which your predecessors tumbled headlong. Communicate with your community. Don’t promise what you can’t deliver. If you find you’re promising something you can’t deliver, let people know. Keep everyone informed and keep them excited. Pay attention to the design of other MMOs. Play other people’s games—and, more importantly, play your own game. Don’t add features that aren’t important. Make sure you’ve got one guy who has wrapped his head around the design trajectory of the game and the goals of the design. Make sure you’ve got someone who has their head fully wrapped around the lore. Make sure you’ve got a programmer that understands the architecture of the modules inside-and-out and can direct the general construction of the game. Etcetera.

Staying away from the Space King Kong Nazi Ape means do not try to directly compete with WoW. Find new mechanics and perfect them. Make a different game. Don’t be afraid to genre-bend, but don’t let genre-related marketing drive design. Don’t make a game that is a reflection of a game already considered fun; Make a fun game.

The games that act on the prerogatives set forward in this post will comprise the MMO revolution. The generation of MMOs that starts the revolution will be smaller games than we’re used to in the MMO field. They will be released early and patched often. They will evolve into fun games elaboratively. There will be no Great Leap Forward, but instead a series of rapid, modest steps. It’s easier to walk up a mountain than it is to leap to the top of it.

The One Character Fallacy

Many of the character advancement problems that we encounter in modern MMOs are caused by the one-character philosophy. Single-player RPGs adhere to this philosophy for good reason and originated it as a metaphor. As with the blind adoption of many of the other tropes of single-player RPGs, MMOs have taken this one blindly and not done adequate work to adapt it to fit the realities of massively multiplayer gaming.

The one-character philosophy exists and has persisted because of these design decisions:

1. Player characters do not age.
2. Player characters cannot actually die.
3. There can only be a limited number of PCs per player.
4. Character advancement is very time-consuming.
5. Character advancement is almost entirely vertical.

The one-character philosophy doesn’t need to be a static emplacement in MMORPG design. There are several well-documented issues with expecting the players to stick with one character throughout their journeys:

1. Grinds are necessary to keep players playing if they are meant to stick to one character. Developers want to milk as much play time from characters as humanly possible.
2. Vertical character progression has to be long. This means that level barriers lie between you and having fun doing what you want in the game world.
3. The wild swings of the nerfbat turn your favorite max level character into a useless sideshow in your favorite style of play. You’ve put 150 days of playtime into your character, but now it’s all rendered moot because the balance has tipped out of your favor.
4. Making an alt means repeating the whole grind again!
5. Lots of vertical progression means lots of content strewn across the game world that is only accessible to narrow groups of players at a time. 90% of the game world is useful to less than 10% of the players at a given time. Making good content is difficult and uneconomical considering the low number of total hours players will spend with that content.
6. Max level boredom is the result of grinding your way to max level, then looking out over the desolate landscapes of useless locales and wondering “now that I’ve climbed the mountain, what do I do next?” This is less a problem is World of Warcraft, because the game is very top-heavy, but in other games this is brutal. (Warhammer)
7. Death has to be meaningless or half of the players will run around naked, sit in town and macro all day, or become exploiters due to inhuman risk aversion.
8. Permanent decisions are anathema because characters have to live with what might be cripplingly bad decisions for the rest of eternity unless the player wants to throw away the time spent on that character.

MMOs refuse to stick to this metaphor wholesale (aside from Darkfall and other games that force you to only play as one character on one world) when they allow alts. This allowance is the first down the road to mortal characters in MMORPGs.
Problems with perma-death:

1. Discourages character investment.
2. May overly reward excessive play-time.
3. Character progression may be overly repetitive.
4. Managing too many characters at once.

Design responses (off the top of my head):

1. Focus on horizontal character progression.
2. Ensure there are important activities that a character can only do when the player is offline. Characters may have to sleep for a certain amount of their lives to not face penalties. Such penalties make it optimal to play multiple characters while not necessarily making every one of them uber.
3. Reduce vertical progression to the side-effect of good and skillful play. A 10% cap on vertical ability gain would be reasonable. Ensure that vertical progression is no longer the focus—speccing well and having a strategy for your character should be more important.
4. You don’t need to be logged in as particular characters to perform certain actions. Perhaps web-based or otherwise out-of-game interfaces would be more effective for managing the auction house, trade goods production, and other repetitive activities that can be more effectively managed from a dedicated interface outside of the game engine.

Discarding the one-character philosophy has its own problems, but it’s impossible to fully grasp the potential of a multi-character system until it’s actually implemented, and I don’t see any games giving it an honest go yet. One-character thinking has reached its natural conclusion; we need to move on. MMOs have proven their marketability, it's time to make game mechanics that leverage the nature of an online game instead of shoe-horning single-player mechanics into multi-player games where they do not belong. I believe the one-character philosophy is one design stumbling block past which we will find much better MMOs.

Cutting Down the Role of Chance: Loot

There are two key factors in making looting fun—we shouldn’t trample these in our attempt to remove randomness:

The first is Variability. In the case of very low variability, loot becomes routine and uninteresting. The potential for rare or unique items is limited by either the number of rare or unique NPCs in the game world or the number of high-skill crafters. High variability can lead to overpowered or useless loot being the majority of what is dropped; this can spell havoc for power growth schemes and leads to looting becoming a very cheap, high pay-off slot machine.

The second is Appropriateness, which can be split into two factors: appropriateness for the player doing the looting and appropriateness for NPC being looted. Players get excited when they find loot that is appropriate for their character—here we encounter the first kind of appropriateness. Loot that offers an upgrade from the character’s current equipment (without breaking power growth balance) or that offers a different kind of ability to the character is viewed as appropriate. Loot should also be appropriate to the NPC carrying it—a bear should drop a bear pelt, not a sword.

So how do we remove the role of chance from loot and what does that do for us?

An easy and very intuitive way to handle NPC equipment and possessions: give each item a 1 in X chance of being on a given NPC or NPC type, then specify an offset value for each (this value can be anything as long as the offsets are different). Start a spawn counter for each NPC type and give the NPC each item when spawn_counter + offset is divisible by the X above. X can be modified depending on the kind of players that have been hunting the NPCs (if the NPCs are intelligent enough to make such a modification)—perhaps a camp of human bandits will start spawning with more fire-resistant gear if a player has been ravaging them with fireballs for the past half-hour.

At first, this approach seems sufficient, but we’ve made assumptions that aren’t necessarily true in an MMO. Looting isn’t an entirely blind process. The player might know loot rates and so kill off a lot of creatures that drop certain items, greatly unbalancing the totals of important items available for future players to loot off of mobs. Also, there may be some mechanic that allows the player to see what kind of loot the NPC is holding (for instance, if the NPC has a giant glowing sword, a player would be more likely to go after the NPC because of the higher reward). The counter-based solution is good for generating your starting NPC population’s loot, but the system has no awareness of what’s already in the world. If players only kill off the NPCs they know have certain items, the drop rate will stray because the existing population has drop rates that are effectively significantly lower. To counteract this, the system needs to keep track of the loot currently on NPCs in the world and spawn NPCs with or without the loot in order to keep the distribution on or near target. This certain doesn’t need to manifest itself in unique mobs respawning instantly after they’re killed, though; I mainly imagine this solution applied to make keep quests doable without excess grinding.

We can also use the way combat resolves to modify the loot enemies will drop. When different kinds of attacks land on the opponent, they can lead to different effects on the opponent’s equipment. A fireball would burn away cloth armor or melt metal armor, for instance, leaving nothing worth taking in the former case or only some metal scraps in the latter case. The more times the opponent is hit by standard weapons, the poorer condition his armor is going to be in. You can imagine a myriad of attack-item reactions that can lead to loot being lost or transformed. Suddenly, spells that debilitate the opponent without affecting their belongings will be a crucial tool in a mage’s arsenal and allow them to be more than just glass cannon DPS.

If we implement these two policies, we not only increase the role of player decision-making in what loot is dropped (and also encourage a diversity of effect types in order to preserve or destroy certain items), we also prevent the ever-annoying problem where the random number generator gives you a fifty percent chance of getting that quest item, but the coin keeps landing on tails instead of the needed heads. We certainly don’t have to compromise any variability or appropriateness in the process.

In-game Historians

We’ve spent several posts discussing the way that MMORPGs miserably fail to tell meaningful stories. Theme-park MMOs have story and gameplay as separate and unrelated endeavors. Story may motivate the fluff around gameplay, but games seldom require an understanding of the story. The story amounts to text that players are encouraged to skip.

How do we make story a meaningful part of MMORPGs? A dynamic world is a necessity, of course, but with a dynamic world it’s easy for the state of the world to become difficult to figure out for even veteran players. There needs to be a way for players to easily grok the state of the game world in order to allow players to make intelligent decisions that will have meaningful effects on the world. We can do this by creating a robust system for aggregating in-game history. Let’s see what we need to make this happen.

1. We need people who are willing to perform the roles of historians and journalists.

As EVE Online has shown us, players are willing to write about their endeavors in the game world—some players are willing to spend hours writing about what other players have done. These players are the historians and journalists of the game world, taking accounts of the history of the world as it unfolds through player action.

Games that have static stories and recycled NPC bosses have players willing to perform the role of historian as well, but these players are relegated to becoming meta-game historians. They don’t keep track of events as they happen in relation to the game world, instead they keep track of the happenings of guilds and other player organizations as they accomplish feats that have no effect on the game world, but are notable nonetheless.

We’ve already fulfilled this requirement.

2. We need dynamic game worlds where important events occur often enough to keep historians and journalists interested and engaged. We need a supply of things for journalists to report and historians to write about.

Theme-park MMOs need not apply. Sure, the meta-game will entertain some players enough, but there’s not much effect of what is notable and there’s not much that is notable.

We need a world where it is important that players know the political situation. In a world where player-run factions have very limited power and are basically interchangeable, an effective news gathering force is not particularly important. Player-run factions need to be able to effect the shape of the game world in some radical ways.

EVE basically accomplishes this goal.

3. We need the game to track the facts of historical events in a useful fashion that can be publicly viewed (or viewed only by the privileged historian group).

Player accountability is the fundamental principle here. There should be some degree of a factual, unfalsifiable record of what characters have done in the game world. It doesn’t have to be in gory detail—it can be as simple as “A defeats B” or “Faction A completes constructions of X in city Y, these players were involved” with a timestamp. The game could even generate a barebones wiki to allow this information to be easily viewed. Historians can then put details of the event and the significance of the event on the pre-generated wiki pages. Each player can have their own wiki page with their accomplishments, as well—everyone loves a good way to brag and a relatively permanent place to keep track of their achievements in the game.

Managing who can edit what pages in the wiki is a little bit of a challenge, but should not be difficult considering you can easily hold players accountable for edits (because they’ve got their edits associated with their account information). It’s not difficult to track how different players participate and ban griefers while promoting the good writers and experts to moderator or moderator-like status (they would be the historians of the game world).

Meaningful in-game history engages many different kinds of players and is a natural extension of a dynamic game world. I would love to see a game where I can click on a “more info” link next to a city in the game and see a history of the people who have controlled it, what they have done, and what’s going on now. Did someone just gank me? I can look him up and see where he hangs out, who he hangs out with, and what he does. Such transparency emphasizes player accountability and has the opportunity to give significant added meaning to the elements of the game world.

Design Concept: Playful Gods

Mot made a big post about horizontal progression. He considers horizontal progression to be characters gaining ability in many roles simultaneously. Certainly such progression would solve group composition problems, but it doesn’t jive with the metaphor of “the character.” If we want to let any character do anything at any time, then we’re basically destroying the abstraction of the character. The metaphor doesn’t work if any individual character can do anything, because real people (real “characters”) experience vertical progression much more often than horizontal progression. We need to create a new metaphor so that this alternative model makes sense when implemented.

Melf over at Word of Shadow came up with something similar to what I’m going to outline below. You may want to read over his post as well as this one to see two different takes on this approach. The both revolve around the same concept of disassociating the player from specific player-owned individual characters.

Instead of having the player create and maintain characters with static abilities and have those characters tied to the player, let players choose the abilities they want to have for a play session, then let them inhabit a hero who has those abilities. Players can save profiles of sets of abilities they like to use, or maybe they can buy unfettered access to certain characters they like by expending some kind of meta-resource.

This character rental system seems odd and awkward at first, but it’s not difficult to see how it could be fun. Players could assume the role of minor gods, meddling in the lives of the mortals in the game world (who are only occasionally controlled by players). Players curry favor with the mortals by manipulating the environment in minor ways, expending some kind of resource similar to mana in the process. These actions have realistic effects on the game world that penalize overuse of similar strategies repeatedly. If you make it rain more so that crops will grow, you will drown them if you’re not careful. If you manipulate the winds, you may slow down trade by creating doldrums where the trade winds once were. Such large effects on the game world cannot be done very often, though, to prevent the world from falling into chaos as whimsical players negligently exploit their powers.

At the beginning of a player’s career, he only has any control over one character: a prophet who has witnessed the player’s power first hand and wishes to draw others to the cause. This prophet, if manipulated properly, brings more like-minded followers to the player’s cause. Although providing divine inspiration by taking control of the prophet is cheap and can be done often, the prophet is weak and will not live long into the game. Players can inspire higher XP-value characters as they gain more followers. Based on the maximum amount of XP-value a player can control and the number of followers the player has, the player can configure characters with the abilities and traits that the player wishes to use in the game.

Conflict between players naturally occurs as gods with different goals, and gods of different things, use different means to curry favor. There are also a limited number of mortals in the world to work their magic on, which leads to competition to better please potential followers.

Group play can involve both inspired characters and allied player gods. The gods can use their abilities to modify the terrain and create effects that will aid the inspired character in accomplishing its goals.

Players would only be able to inspire character when they are to do important things (a similar concept to questing), and if the character does not accomplish its task or, even worse, backstabs allies or causes other problems, this will lead to the player’s followers losing faith and turning to an opposing god for favor.

What do you think about this idea? I’m aware of several flaws in it and I have my own doubts about its feasibility; I want to see if you have similar concerns and can offer suggestions to make this idea more robust.

Vertical Progression: the Proliferation of Big Numbers

One thing is guaranteed when you play MMOs: You’ll start by seeing small numbers and end by seeing big ones. This is “growth” and “progress” for your character. We can grasp progress easily when it’s presented in the vocabulary of gradually increasing numbers. Ten damage is worse than 10,000. No one can contest that.

What is important to the game, though, is not that the numbers grow, but that there is a seeming disparity in power levels between characters (hence the term “level”). This disparity has to be significant between characters of different explicit levels to encourage people to continue playing so that they too can become so powerful.

How easily we forget that power is relative in MMORPGs. It’s not how many levels you have under your belt, but how well you can take advantage of those levels to make your character more powerful than the other ones of your level. You care about this because you are best rewarded for fighting battles where you are of lower or equal level with your opponent. This is especially the case in the ever-rapidly-approaching endgames of theme-park MMOs where level becomes irrelevant when you reach the meat of the game, the endgame.

My enjoyment is not sourced at seeing a character level up. I’ve seen that happen thousands of times in my life. I’ve built Dungeons and Dragons characters from scratch and planned their progression before. I’ve played characters that have gone from tavern brawler to god. The little carrot presented by leveling has lost its meaning. Now all I see are the mechanics before me: what abilities I need to unlock and what gear I’ll need to obtain so that I can execute whatever plan I have for my character.

In a game where there is no real story to go along with the long vertical climb of character progression, I lose interest as soon as the mechanics relevant to my class wear thin. There’s little to substantiate the long grinds I’ll have to endure in order to hit max level. The treadmill-like nature of this action becomes starkly apparent when I notice that the relative challenge of the game never really increases. The stakes never get higher. The rewards don’t get more meaningful. I’m running in place. That discourages me and gets me into a funk that leads to hitting the cancel button.

Players don’t need to waste their time running in place for 50 levels before hitting the real meat of the game. The players that MMOs make the most money off of spend much more time at max level than they do leveling. In World of Warcraft, leveling to max level doesn’t take more than a couple of months (or less) of serious play. I’ve known people who have played the game for five years. They’ve spent maybe three months leveling and at least twelve-fold more time in the endgame with their main.

After all this vitriol, you may be surprised that I do not wish to turn character advancement from a pyramid into a broad, flat plane lying orthogonal to the axis of power. There needs to be some vertical difference between characters with different specializations in order to allow players to mix and match abilities. If we have an on-off switch for each kind of ability in the game that indicates if the player is able to do that kind of ability, but there is only one “level” of each ability, there is no middle-ground where characters can have back-up abilities that they use if their mainstays aren’t useful. It doesn’t make sense to have abilities be “best” or “non-existent”. There needs to be some vertical, though it should not dwarf the horizontal.

I suggest between three and five tiers of power for important abilities. This limits vertical advancement enough that it is not a terrible grind, while allowing some differentiation between characters that want to do similar things but specialize in different places. To make this vertical advancement less grindy, I suggest severely reducing the maximum level attainable or removing levels from the game and allowing players to allocate XP to buy individual skills they want their character to have. Skills would naturally be in some kind of tree structure, but ability gain would only be gated by experience gained, not by level and some other limited resource (like talent points in WoW).

Naturally, in a less vertical system you will need to have caps on total experience points allowed for a character to have spent at one time. There are ways to make experience points above this cap meaningful. For example, once a character achieves max XP and spent it all on abilities, further XP could unlock below-cap XP to be respecced at will (preferably only out of combat). Let’s say the cap is 10,000 XP. Once a character reaches 10,000 XP, he starts gaining XP in a “respec pool”. The player can deallocate XP from abilities up to his respec pool amount and reassign them as he likes. As the character continues to accrue XP, each point of XP may no longer increase the respec pool by one point. Diminishing returns or a cap on respec pool gain can stop players from constantly shifting their characters to different FOTM builds. Or, if you want, you can allow all characters who have advanced this far to respec whenever they want. This would certainly make Mot happy.

The Role of Chance

“Cutting down the role of chance” is one of the more overlooked of my 10 Points for the MMORPG Revolution, so I will tackle it first.

The first step towards cutting down the role of chance is to understand the role of chance. Randomness is a root preconception that players have in MMORPGs, and, to seasoned RPG players, it seems absolutely necessary. In actuality, this assumption need not hold. In this post, I will review the roles of chance and why we want to reduce its role in upcoming MMORPGs. In a later post I will offer suggestions as to how to cut down the role of chance in specific instances of each of these roles.

(As a thought experiment, I encourage you to think about how you’d design an MMORPG that does not use a random number generator. We’ll see if our ideas match up when I get to the second part of this discussion later on.)

Here are the three roles chance plays in MMORPGs. (If you can think of more, please comment! I want to make this article as complete as possible without getting overly concrete and nitpicky.)

Random Numbers Simulate Character Ability

In role playing games of all kinds, random numbers are used to determine the outcome of events because they can resolve actions independently of player skill. If a character needs to roll a 15 or more on a 20-sided die to successfully perform an action, that character has less skill than the character who can roll a 10 or more and succeed. No level of player planning can overcome his characters limitations without some luck—this is appropriate, because ability gating and character growth are important, fundamental parts of RPGs.

Random Numbers Model Unforeseen Factors

Random numbers model the effects of actions that are outside of our scope of observation. In real life, we notice events that seem to occur randomly, but this is just a symptom of our subjective viewpoint. Because we don’t see the causes of certain events, we assume that they’re random. Under further analysis, we find that human-level events have complex cause-and-effect relationships that, if followed prior to the “random” event, make the event an obvious effect. As individuals, we can perceive so few of these strands of cause-and-effect that it is impossible to get our heads around most of the complex activities that we are subject to in a given day. Hence, the idea of "randomness" or "chance" in human-level interactions and one of the roles that chance plays in RPG systems.

Random Numbers Provide Variety

Random Numbers are used in generating loot and monster spawns and can be used for determining the behavior of enemies (if there are multiple equally viable AI strategies). This randomness provides variety in the game world and is partially responsible for how addictive loot-heavy games are, Diablo II especially.

Entire dungeons can be generated on the fly using random numbers. Diablo II did this, but there are more interesting procedurally generated maps in roguelike games. Much replayability in roguelikes is due to the ever-different dungeons and maps that present the play with a seemingly endless number of interesting tactical situations and fiendishly difficult dungeon levels.

There’s a lot of work done in procedurally generated content, as well. Most of this stuff is rather technical, but goes to show that there are a lot of people working on effective ways to use random numbers to generate content in games.

Motivation For Reducing the Role of Chance

Why do we want to get rid of as many random number-determined actions as possible? With few exceptions this mechanic has been the core of RPGs for as long as RPGs have existed.

If we want to give the player the ability to change the world and affect other characters in meaningful ways, we need to make decision-making the central process. We need to allow decision-making to determine the outcome of events, not chance. If we provide the player with appropriate information about the decision they are going to make, there’s no reason to build into the game a chance of that decision failing outright due to a bad die roll (something that’s completely out of any player’s hands). I’m not suggesting that we remove failure from MMOs, but instead that we remove unavoidable failure from individual player’s actions.

In a system that allows player success to the best decision-makers, players can easily see what they have done wrong and accept their losses as lessons for the future. If the dice screw you, you’re going to be upset at the game—nothing is learned. If you plan poorly or make a bad decision, you can identify that without the obscuring power of dice rolls and make intelligent decisions using that input in the future, leading to player skill and player learning being the most important facets of the game, not time invested and luck.

The MMORPG Revolution (The 10 Points)

I think Syncaine’s got it right in his recent post. MMOs suck as games. As I’ve pointed out before, their mechanics don’t work together with their stories to produce a complete, self-sustaining package. The mechanics lead to the most efficient styles of gameplay being tedious time sinks. Social pressure can keep people playing MMOs for only so long before they completely burn out on the barely-sufficient mechanics and leave. Even the alternatives to theme-park MMOs are weak because they still require from the player a lot of tedious, boring work.

I don’t think these obstacles can be surmounted by evolution—we need revolution. We need games to try whole new styles of immersion, character advancement, combat, crafting, harvesting, and just about everything else.

Below I present you my 10 points for the re-envisaging of MMORPG. I will spend more time going over each of these points and suggesting ways to implement them. A few games have accomplished one or two of these, but I’ve yet to see a game include more than half of them.

The Ten Points:

1. Severely limit vertical character progression. A character should not be inherently more powerful the longer he spends playing the game. A character should be more powerful if the player plans its ability use better or plays the game better.
   
   
2. Focus on horizontal character progression. More abilities that are of relatively equal power become available as characters progress.
   
   
3. Foster non-combat professions and give players meaningful content that doesn’t involve fighting.
   
   
4. Do not force players into PvP. But reward players for doing it—if it’s a higher risk activity, it should be more rewarding.
   
   
5. Death needs to have meaning. The obsession with single-character play has to end. It yields too much investment in one character which leads to severe risk aversion.
   
   
6. Cut down on the role of chance. We can create sophisticated, innovative, strategically deep combat mechanics, we don’t have to rely on random number generators to provide spice in MMORPGs.
   
   
7. When a player is in-game, he should be doing something meaningful. Gameplay has to have effects, even if they are small, on both other characters and the player’s character. These effects build a story and a living world which reward intelligent action and planning.
   
   
8. Let the players make the story. The world can have a rich history that rewards thorough reading, but the present needs to be in control of the players. They need to have the power to make game-level stories happen and to record them in a way that is publicly viewable.
   
   
9. Encourage community-building behavior. Reward players for being in groups, guilds, and factions. Give groups experience bonuses, better item drops, and other perks for participating in the social part of the game. If a game encourages socialization, it more quickly engenders social responsibility in its players—this binds players and keeps them playing the game.
   
   
10. Focus on the player’s in-game experience. If you give the player a rich world, rewarding actions to undertake, and well-constructed game mechanics, your game can still fail. It’s crucial that you present the game to the player with the utmost care. The game has to allow the player to plan and make intelligent decisions: the player must be presented with appropriate information, well laid-out and easy to read and understand.