Category: General

It’s about 10:00 AM on a Wednesday.  I’m at the office.  I’m tired as hell. 

Last night I took my level 56 Loremaster into the Grand Stair on hard mode in Moria.  This was my first taste of the end-game content in LOTRO, and I loved it. 

Do you know that scene at the climax of Disney’s Ratatouille when the bitter old food critic finally tastes the vegetable dish the movie is named after?  The food critic is blissfully transported back in time via flashback to his childhood.  That’s how this instance made me feel.

I guess it wasn’t a lifetime ago that I last felt the thrill of an end-game instance.  I only started running the heroic-encounters in SWG a little over six months ago.  But six months is a long time in MMO time.  Nothing has happened at the office in that time, but endless stories have been forged in-game.

End game instances are the only instances which can be extremely difficult and challenging.  You can’t bring more help than is allowed in the instance and you can’t out-level the monsters inside.  You have to work as a team and you have to have a good strategy down.  It’s the only way to win.  And god is it satisfying when you win.

After completing the instance a second time, I said my goodbyes to my kin-mates.  “I have to leave for work in two hours” I told them.

Tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep.  My face was stuck smiling.  I felt like I had partied at a dance club all night.  Yet as good as I felt about my all-night gameplay, I knew I had only just dipped my toe into the shallow-end of the pool.  There are so many more instances and so much more content to master.

I can’t wait to face more “hard mode” challenges.  Thankfully, now that I’m near level 60, I won’t have to wait long.

Re-reading Asimov’s “The Last Question” reminded me of that day’s vision of computers. As computers became more powerful, they would become larger, with millions of banks of [transistors/vacuum tubes/integrated circuits]. Asimov’s stories refer to city- and planet-sized supercomputers, usually with limited access but sometimes with many terminals so that anyone can ask The Computer a question. Asimov’s computers exhibit increasing returns to scale, so computing becomes centralized with large computers running everything, overcoming the Hayekian knowledge problem through massive computation. This seemed as obvious a future as flying cars. Then PCs came, and we have since learned a great deal more about how size affects computation speed.

We now live in a networked world. We have massive numbers of small computers that cooperate. Your computer is pretty good, but its greater value comes from being able to connect to this server and a million others. Your life features distributed computing, torrents, Wikipedia, and all the Here Comes Everybody Web 2.0 fun and games. Your gas pump has a credit card reader and may have a news feed. Your stoplight monitors traffic, changes timing, and talks to its own network. Your cell phone has more computing power than the entire world did when your parents were born.

Now this future is obvious. Rainbows End charts the near-term implications brilliantly: computers light and thin enough to be sewn into clothing, contact lens monitors, enhanced reality, and ubiquitous wireless internet tying everything together. Everyone and everything is networked at all times, and many of us carry our own little self-selected worlds with us. Smaller computers, faster access, more personalization.

I wonder what future will be obvious sixty years from now. Biological computing, with living cells in place of circuits? Direct neural interfaces with re-programmable brains? Uploads and emulations? Nanotech is an extension of our current line of thought. Perhaps an AI singleton will start converting mass to computronium, and we will arrive at Asimov’s planet-sized computer by a different angle.

: Zubon

They were standing there on the kitchenette counter where a co-worker with an overflow of Easter candy had left them.  The marshmallow Peeps were lined up, execution style.  I gleefully grabbed the nearest one and popped it into my mouth.  There was a satisfying soft cry as the air inside the marshmallow tried to break free from the sweet inside of the bird-shaped candy.  I took a moment to reflect on all the cruelties the Peeps endure.  I imagined people’s deepest desires blossoming from the days of cave and fire to inflict carnal delights on small animal shaped treats.  And, then I thought of MMOs…

MMO developers can be a clever bunch.  They put that 2 HP spotted faun or clover-eating rabbit walking along while players are on a zone-wide crossing.  The obvious thing to do?  Drop a run-by DoT or damaging yell on your way by the poor beast and watch it flop over dead.  It’s like a minigame without consequence or reward.  Sometimes the devs allow the poor creatures to fight back.  Regardless, it is nearly an MMO pastime.  So much, I believe, that if it weren’t for the graveyard daemons, peaceful fields would be strewn with dead, lootless fauna.

It goes deeper, though, when players return as completely overpowered demi-gods to places of relative peace.  Whole hapless murloc villages are torn asunder by a sole dimension-walking hero.  The guy wasn’t even helping anybody else.  The imagination makes up for what the game engine lacks.  Over on the Darkfall side, the practice targets the plump, weak freshly-minted players in the noob zone.  The hardened veterans fall upon the sheep like avenging razor-fanged wolflords.  The world is theirs.

And, maybe that’s it.  In worlds where players have no perceptible stake amidst the infinitely respawning mobs and hallowed raid locks, for that one moment we can be kings.

–Ravious
what is best in life?

Tobold plugged a Newcastle University Business School research project based on the potential beneficial or detrimental effects of playing MMORPGs during off-job hours on employee well-being.  The survey reads like some undergraduate amateur hour where they did not really take time to contemplate the responses (e.g., they don’t even have my degree, grammatical errors), but I can deal with rough surveys on topics I am interested in.  What I cannot deal with and what caused me to immediately dead stop on my progress for their “research” was their opening list of how strongly do you agree/disagree with the following:

1. PLAYING MMORPGs: The following statements concern how important massively-multiplayer online role playing games (MMROPGs) are for you.

• MMORPGs have created real problems for me, but I keep playing.
• Sometimes I only plan to play a MMORPG for a few minutes and wind up spending hours in front of it.
• Playing MMORPGs takes up almost all of my leisure time.
• I would be a lot more productive if I didn’t play MMORPGs so much.
• My family and friends get angry and tell me that I play too much, but I can’t stop.
• I often play for a longer time than I intended.
• I spend much more time playing than just about anything else.
• I would spend more time with hobbies if I didn’t play so much.
• Sometimes I feel like my whole life revolves around MMORPGs.
• I often think that I should cut down on the amount of MMORPGs that I play.
• When I can’t play I get restless or irritable.

To be fair later on in separate sections they ask whether you get enjoyment from playing, if you are cheerful when you are playing, when you play you play for yourself, etc. BUT, the damage is done. The tone was set. I believe I have a very healthy amount of computer gaming time that allows me to amuse my wife and play with my toddler and be fully successful at my job; yet, this Monday morning I felt like MMOs were the worst and most unhealthy thing in my life after reading that list. I refuse to complete the survey because it is clearly apparent what result Dr. Savvas Papagiannidis from Newcastle University (U.K.) and Dr. Despoina Xanthopoulou from Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands) wish to have. Look for them later this year on a depressing report coinciding with a gamer suicide or divorce.

–Ravious
it’s all about the small stuff

In MMORPGS we always want things bigger.  We want bigger worlds, bigger cities, and of course we want a bigger server population.  We reason that if there’s several thousand players on a server, there’s sure to be people online in every area of the game at all times.  No one wants to live in a world which feels empty.

But there are certain design decisions which work well for a server population of a few hundread that doesn’t work for a server population in the thousands.  When I used to play MUDs in the 90’s, I would normally expect a grand total of 5 to 30 people online at any given time.  Everyone knew everyone.  Everyone knew everyone’s alts.  You hung out with the same people every day and you complained about the same people every day.  It was like living in a small village.

MMOs on the other hand, are cities.  They wouldn’t be “massively multiplayer” without being massive.  You have to make an effort to group with friends.  Unlike a MUD, an MMO character you meet is entirely forgettable.  This causes certain gameplay mechanics which work really well in MUDs to break in MMOs.

In the MUD I played longest, there was full player vs player combat, with corpse-looting.  Players who stole items after a battle were shunned and players who honorably let their victim reclaim their corpse were known praised.  Someone who picked on newbie characters or new players was held in especially low regard.  It was possible to round up a gang to chase a newbie-killer around the MUD and make the game practically unplayable for them.

I thought I’d have a similar experience when I started playing the Ultima Online beta.  But there were too many people.  Someone could kill you the day the servers went live, and never be seen again.  Someone who helped you defend your honor could also disappear into the crowd.  Perhaps it was a factor of the newness of the server that kept a set of norms from developing.  But ever since the dawn of the MMO, I’ve never known the name of every character on a server, as I once did.

If MMOs want to have servers where players form  meaningful friendships, alliances, hatreds, and enemies, then they may need to design their MMOs to function with smaller servers.

I bought ice cream this weekend. While I was not looking, the boxes shrunk again. They went from 2 quarts to 1.75 quarts a while ago. I adjusted. They are down to 1.5 quarts now, and everyone seems to have gotten the memo at once.

On most products, people are most sensitive to price differences, then quantity, then quality. The immediate price difference is also essential: even if an appliance will obviously cost $50 more per year to use than the one next to it, a $75 difference in price will swing an overwhelming amount of business to the cheaper one. For some things, you really care about quality and are a connoisseur, but on the whole you will notice a $5 difference before you notice a less fine patina on the finish. So price is immutable. You will not charge more or less than $15/month for your MMO, because if you charge more, you are a ripoff, and if you charge less, you are obviously the ghetto MMO.

Quantity is the next thing to vary. You can fake that with a bigger box: people do not look closely. Note when you buy paper towels, that they translate “big rolls!” into smaller ones. They are trying to avoid that problem, where people pay more for 8 small rolls than 6 big rolls. In MMOs, our variant is “36 zones! 128 playable classes!” How many of those zones are repetitive or procedural content? Did you get those classes by taking every possible combination of skills and giving each package a name? “Hush you!” So your detergent has a “new concentrated formula!” that requires more per load in some random-sized box.

Quality? Who notices quality? You can’t tell on half the things you buy. The same products come off the line and go into boxes with a half-dozen brand names. The terrifying thing is that people enjoy it more when it comes in the higher-priced box. And do you notice a 5% difference in quality on most things, really? Cut the pickles a little thinner, use 2 fewer pepperoni slices on the pizza, put a little less meat and a bit more pasta on the plate. Price is the same, the unit (1 hamburger) is the same, so your buying habits are probably the same. Make the game get by down one member on the Q&A staff, minus a tester, released a week early. People notice the number of zones and the ship date, not how optimized the graphics coding is; the few who do care are the whiny customers we could stand to do without. You will probably have a new job when it’s time to pay the piper, and the next guy will blame any problems on you anyway.

You hardly noticed yourself losing one hair at a time, but you woke up bald one fine morning.

: Zubon

I stop at Taco Bell every couple of weeks. I order one Beef & Potato Burrito and two Big Taste Tacos. In the past year, those prices have each increased by a dime, so the order is now $4 after tax. I have spent more time pondering that 8% increase than it will ever cost me to pay it.

I ponder because it is odd that I felt price sensitivity. Not enough to even look around the menu for new items, but I noticed. I get the principal of watching the cents so the dollars take care of themselves, and I can see the cumulative effect in my bank statements, but I really don’t care about a few dimes. And yet, somehow, I do.

People will drive across town to save $5 on a $15 item but not $5 on a $125 item. Because 1/3 off is big! But it’s the same $5. If it is worth your time to save $5 on one, it is worth your time to save $5 on both.

$15 a month? I spend more than that per person on a nice dinner. That is a couple of movie tickets. I get a ridiculous amount of value for my money.

I would probably be happier with an MMO that charged me more and took less time, with concentrated awesome instead of grind, travel, downtime, and things meant to prolong subscription fees. I would probably be happier with a premium game that charged me $30/month and had great servers, fast customer service, and less rabble. (Show of hands developers: half the people at twice the price, you in?)

But I still notice price sensitivity when I could have WoW for $15.

: Zubon

Some times, devs just know things:

The only place where I find a very broad approach useful is in convenience of play. What is a player’s overall tolerance for inconvenience and delay of any sort? In that one regard I do tend to think in terms of casual and hardcore I suppose. A hardcore player will put up with less refined UI, buggier content, long travel times, and other things that basically delay or degrade the play experience. A casual player will quit after fairly little irritation of that sort.

Vastin knows a lot of things.

–Ravious
how deep the rabbit hole goes

Zubon many times has reminded MMO players that in “their” epic story to become a hero, well… you aren’t.  This position is debatable (and has been debated).  Regardless, we can assume for the sake of this post that making the player feel like a unique hero in a game-spanning story is quite difficult.  What if the player was not actually supposed to be the hero in the first place?  Could the writers create a story, where the player was merely a cog in the grand workings of the world AND also make the story meaningful?  My position is that “yes, with skilled writers this is possible.”

Continue reading Persignifficult (A Reminder Revisited)