"X" would be Cool ... becomes Nobody does "X"

[Ryan Dancey]

Love all the feedback on these threads!

A thing you should consider before posting your ideas is "what happens in a world where tens of thousands of people can react to the idea all at once"?

Let me give you an example. If you said "it would be cool if you left your mount standing outside a dungeon while you went exploring - because I'd like to be a mount thief who specialized in finding abandoned mounts and taking them", this is what the emergent behavior would be on the server: Nobody would ever leave a mount standing outside a dungeon.

That is, the ABILITY to do the thing you think is cool will cause all the other players to modify their behavior to avoid letting you do that thing. So you never get the cool payoff inherent in your concept but every other player on the server has to suffer by not using mounts. Obviously, that's not good design. :)

MMOs have been around long enough for many of these problems to have manifested in actual games. Players are fiendishly good at figuring out how to take ideas that seem "rational" or "realistic" and twist them in ways that utterly destroys the quality of the experience for most of the other players.

I'll give you a couple of examples so you can see the kinds of emergent things that happen.

In Ultima Online, you could build a house virtually anywhere. Eventually, people figured out that the real value of houses was not to use them as dwellings, but to use them as walls, since if you built them close enough together they were impassable. The result were large areas of the map that were inaccessible to anyone who didn't have the ability to bypass the walls of houses. Once a single group did this, every other group went into a land grab mode trying to seal off as large a territory as they could before competition from other groups interfered. The result was a map that turned into a chaotic maze of house-walls.

In Darkfall, every item you carry can be looted if you die. Since killing a single, fully equipped character is a much better source of getting good gear than grinding your way through dungeons or doing the resource harvesting/crafting cycle, it quickly became the norm for small groups to prey on anyone who dared to leave the safe confines of a city wearing decent gear. The result was that players started to play naked characters with a concentration on spells instead of items to do damage and the whole player economy and PvE adventure content died.

In Warhammer Online, high level characters could become tagged for retribution if they attacked low level characters. So gangs of low level characters would swarm high level characters engaged in PvE, eventually forcing the player of the high level character to "accidentally" hit one of them (or die from whatever monster was attacking them). Instantly the mob of low level characters would gang up on the now "criminal" high level character and kill it, getting rewards for doing so. Being a gang of low level characters was effectively a free pass to violate the games balance against PvP, at the expense of people who had put in the time to create high level PCs.

So when you're suggesting an idea, do these things first:

1: How will this work if 50 people have to all do it in series or in parallel?

2: How would a smart player who wanted to abuse this rule exploit it to cause someone else pain?

3: What kind of behavior would naturally emerge in a world where your rule was implemented - what's the effect of your cause?

[LazarX]

This has got to be one of the best and definitively concise posts on this subject to date. Credit to where credit is due.

[Derek Vande Brake]

Someone's been studying Kant... :D

[Coldman]

Good post.

I'd be lying if I did not admit to enjoying that certain aspect of player invention and subsequent anarchy.

Those were the days. I say that, it was only a few years ago I was sieging in my underwear in Darkfall.

[Diego Rossi]

Ryan, you can add: healing/buffing the NPC to make it way more stronger and resistant than predicted so the players get killed by it.

It was done in EVE. CCP has patched it so that it is not feasible in high sec. Low sec and 0.0 there is no need for this kind of games. You directly kill the player character.

Edit:

Hudax wrote:

I am reassured by this post.

I agree, it is important to see that Ryan is well aware of this kind of things.

I am fairly annoying in the griefing thread about this kind of problem, but some people seem to dismiss it too easily.

[Hudax]

I am reassured by this post.

[Spanky the Leprechaun]

makes sense.

[Hudax]

Spanky the Leprechaun wrote:

makes sense.

This reminds me of that experiment a few years back where people all over the world were challenged to find some object (I think it was a red balloon with some sort of gps device) that had been hidden somewhere on the globe, and it was found in about 6 hours.

It also reminds me of swarm theory--the idea that all manner of creatures are more intelligent collectively than individually. The example I recall from NPR was, to determine the height of the Empire State building, you really only need to ask 6 random people. The average of their answers will be reasonably accurate.

I am fascinated, but not really surprised, that problems like this can be solved by a group of creative people cooperating over the internet.

I am struggling to see how it is relevant. But, here's to gamers. :)

[Spanky the Leprechaun]

Hudax wrote:

Spanky the Leprechaun wrote:

makes sense.

This reminds me of that experiment a few years back where people all over the world were challenged to find some object (I think it was a red balloon with some sort of gps device) that had been hidden somewhere on the globe, and it was found in about 6 hours.

It also reminds me of swarm theory--the idea that all manner of creatures are more intelligent collectively than individually. The example I recall from NPR was, to determine the height of the Empire State building, you really only need to ask 6 random people. The average of their answers will be reasonably accurate.

I am fascinated, but not really surprised, that problems like this can be solved by a group of creative people cooperating over the internet.

I am struggling to see how it is relevant. But, here's to gamers. :)

I guess what I meant is this: a swarm of them cracked the dna code that scientists have been struggling with for decades, so of course a crew of them is going to find the available loopholes to enable them to flout the "law of the land" in order to grief other players. It's inevitable.

[MicMan]

Yeah, classic examples. I suffered from low level gang up more than once in Warhammer, a game I really wanted to be good...

Some more examples:

During the development of Warhammer players often stated that they wished to be able to level up and get their gear only through PvP. Mythic responded by introducing keeps in the PvP lakes that could be taken and the keep-endboss would drop PvP relevant gear...

Soo, what happened?

Spoiler:

Of course players realized that defending a keep was useless, and worse, even detrimental, because you could only get gear by raiding enemy keeps. Thus a merry PvE round robin of keep taking ensued that effectively killed PvP dead until a sufficient number of people had the gear they "needed".

When killing the endboss in aforementioned keeps there would be a dice roll for all participating players. Players received bonuses on their roll depending on their performance (dps, hps).

Soo, what happened?

Spoiler:

While this seems only fair it resulted in noobs never getting the gear they needed and the players that already had all the gear constantly winning the dice rolls despite having no use for the gear.

From WoW: In the very beginning of WoW PvP was quite funny because it hadn't any rewards at all. There were daily raids around Tarren Mill just for the fun of it.

But then Blizzard introduced the Battlegrounds and entered a ladder system normally used for RTS games where you could get and wear your PvP gear only if you ranked high enough in the instanced Battlegrounds which was determined weekly.

Soo, what happened?

Spoiler:

First, the fun open world PvP died as everyone ever only waited at the entrance of the battleground for an instance to open.
Second, players realized that the ranking system ment your most dire enemy was not the players of the other faction but your own realm mates as you had to rank against them, not against the enemy. This resulted in guilds leaving battlegrounds if there were members of other guilds in it that were ranking high resulting in an endless abortion of battlegrounds until you entered one where you faced a full guild that raped you within a few minutes.

Shadowbane: players could build a small city around a Tree of Life. This was quite nice and something I hope PFO will make possible again. Building a city was no small task and took time and skill.

How could they get such a fun feature wrong?

Spoiler:

Very simple - Shadowbane was very PvP oriented (and the PvP itself was quite good there) and offered the possibility of sieging another city. Alas, sieging was quite easy and thus it frequently happened that players logged in only to realized that their "lifelong" work was undone in the course of a single night...

Dark Age of Camelot was an RvR (Realm vs Realm) centered game. People loved it for that. RvR was fun and because there were three realms instead of two there never were really any balance problems as the two underdog realms could unite and bash on the leader. Nice and fine but some players complained a bit about the lack of PvE content when measured against, for instance, Everquest.

But Mythic got a brilliant plan!

Spoiler:

They introduced the Trials of Atlantis. While the idea of the expansion was quite nice the trials itself were an utter PvE grindfest of epic propotions! After you finally had the items you still needed to level them off certain mobs in Atlantis that sometimes were even quite rare...

But the items were incredibly powerful. A fully equipped DD could onehit an opponent in formerly top notch gear!

The result was the death of PvP for many months until a large number of players had the new gear - many cancelled their subscription during this time.

So yes, small things can really kill an MMO quite fast.

[Are]

LazarX wrote:

This has got to be one of the best and definitively concise posts on this subject to date. Credit to where credit is due.

I agree completely. That post gives me high hopes for PFO :)

[Caineach]

I am reminded of the WoW Plague.
I wish they didn't end it. It was amusing watching people figure out how to avoid it. (I have not played WoW.)

[Klaus van der Kroft]

Pff, X is overrated. Y is much better!

[Ross Byers]

I removed a post and a reply to it. "Popcorn" and "fanning the flames" type posts are not helping.

[Kryzbyn]

Caineach wrote:

I am reminded of the WoW Plague.

I wish they didn't end it. It was amusing watching people figure out how to avoid it. (I have not played WoW.)

It was great fun for griefers...

[Caineach]

Kryzbyn wrote:

Caineach wrote:

I am reminded of the WoW Plague.

I wish they didn't end it. It was amusing watching people figure out how to avoid it. (I have not played WoW.)

It was great fun for griefers...

I know a number of non-griefers who liked it because for the first time player effects had noticable concequences on the game world. Towns became depopulated because of fear of it spreading. It had noticable effects on the economy. It created player-enforced quarentine zones as previously unaffiliated groups band together out of mutual self interest. It was also an interesting insight into group behavior.

I enjoyed listening to the screams of "oh god, the town guard has the plague. Run away." coming from my roommates. Made me chuckle.

EDIT: I should also note that my friends are a bunch of amature game designers interested in player interaction with games, mixed with a decent number of bio majors.

[Kryzbyn]

I'm glad it was entertaining for your friends.

To the OP:

Thanks for the post Ryan. Good stuff, and sumamrizes certain realities very well. Probably won't stop any of the "if wishes were rainbows" threads, but a noble effort :)