I often hear that people have a hard time wrapping their heads around the concept of a "massively multi player" scenario set in a dynamic, systemic, changing world. Lets say, for the purposes of this example, that the game in question is an RTS with multiple players. These players have varying degrees of control as imposed by other players and exist within an environment that reacts to their actions in a natural way. They compete for land, money, and all the other various resources that people generally fight over. If your army is destroyed and you have no recourse for reclaiming it, you lose. It's kinda like...you know... Real war? I don't get how the concept of a dynamic and systemic MMO is any more revolutionary than that of a dynamic and systemic system for handling the physical interactions between objects...you know... A physics system? Ultimately, it's the same dynamic on a different scale. AI systems really are a preemptive proof of concept. So are games like Sim City and other functions of cellular automata. Or, for that reason, the actual world we live in. Science always seeks to extract patterns that can be at least a representation of real world phenomena. Our brains, as massive computers, can pick up on these patterns intuitively. Those well trained, such as painters, can recreate them procedurally. Is it then a well founded belief that we can't write a script to do something as comparatively simple as run a model economy or account for a bit more advanced strategic AI? Spore has this in a microcosm in that its entire world is procedurally generated. Heres a simple example to hopefully illustrate the concept of a changing world: Lets say you have a program that will import Sim City 4 map files into the game Grand Theft Auto on the fly. You're playing Sim City and changing things, they pop up in Grand Theft Auto running on another computer on your network. Hypothetically, that isn't the complicated part. You have an AI play Sim City for you. Viola, systemic changing world. If GTA was online, you'd have a systemic and changing MMO. Is that really a hard concept to grasp? Logically, most quibbles would be about the feasibility of implementing such a system, not the validity of the concept. It's just isolation of patterns. Is it just me, or do a lot of people have problems with abstract thinking? I don't see how an idea so conceptually straightforward and simple yet untried and untested can have so many assured detractors. Am I just paranoid?

Well, maybe I haven't seen the same threads as you, but I don't think people are usually scoffing at just the idea of dynamic MMO systems in general. All MMO's already have some sort of dynamic system; if not actual territory shifts, then there are at least guilds and auction house economies.

I usually have a problem with specific ideas that don't seem thought through but which come up a lot on this board; for example:

"In my MMORPG, every player will have the freedom to burn entire cities to the ground, and affect the environment, and build castles and towns, etc..."
The problem here is that player freedom needs to be tempered with rules and regulations to stop the minority of annoying people from ruining the game for everyone else. In the real world, no one would invest a billion dollars to put up a row of apartment buildings that spell out "u r gay" across the Chicago skyline, or resculpt Mt. Everest into a giant ASCII penis, but they certainly will in an MMO with no rules. Similarly, people will not wantonly murder an entire town or blow up New York City just for fun, because they will suffer legitimate punishment for it. I think it's important to keep in mind just how stupid and annoying the internet makes people before you begin dreaming about how great total freedom would be.

"In my MMORPG, some people will get to be awesome magic kings, who control a thousand other real players who play farmers and janitors and dirt salesmen." The mistake here is that the designer is forgetting that 99% of the people playing the game will want to be an awesome magic king, and almost no one will want to be a dirt salesman. And your game will not be fun if you spend most of your time just being a dirt salesman, grinding day and night hoping to finally become a magic king.

"I want to make an MMORTS." This just needs more thought put into it generally. Most people who post on this forum don't seem to get past the sudden inspiration of "WHOA! It'll be like Starcraft, except, like MMO!!!! OMG I need to post this!" Most RTS's break down when there are 4 or 5 armies playing. Having a thousand actual armies and countries all in one war just seems ridiculous. The MMORTS ideas either fall back on "Well, no, only a few people would get to actually play it like an RTS, most people will just play grunts controlled by the king", which requires looking back at my last paragraph. Even if you somehow made a system where a thousand different armies did make sense, there are still a lot of other problems that need to be thought through to make an MMORTS. Like, where do new players appear on the map when the game has already been going for months? What happens when you log out? How do you deal with the problem of the ever-increasing power of the top players, and stop them from just becoming a global imperial power that makes the game less fun for everyone else? I think some sort of MMO RTS could work and be fun, but it needs a lot more thought put into it than just combining the two acronyms and then hoping some publisher hands you a check for a billion dollars.

Those are the main things I have a problem with. I'm sure there are other ideas I could complain about as well, but I don't remember what they are off the top of my head ;)

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Original post by makeshiftwings /*stuff*/

and that boys and girls, basically sums up why i try to stay out of the vast majority of mmo related threads

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Original post by makeshiftwings I think it's important to keep in mind just how stupid and annoying the internet makes people before you begin dreaming about how great total freedom would be.

QFT

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Original post by makeshiftwings Similarly, people will not wantonly murder an entire town or blow up New York City just for fun, because they will suffer legitimate punishment for it.

it also occurs to me that one person is usually not capable of killing the entire population of a New York sized city with their bare hands just because they killed more bunnies and acquired more exp than its residence.
This is why i ignore anyone who uses "realism" as a excuse for why all MMO's should have (x) feature

[Edited by - Kaze on April 11, 2007 9:44:03 PM]

I agree with both makeshiftwings and Kaze; it tends to be the pie-in-the-sky MMO game concepts that get the detractors, and unfortunately they seem to be common in this forum. I used to put in my two cents of contructive criticism on these posts pointing out much the same problems as makeshiftwings listed, but given the criticism invariably gets ignored by the OP I now try to steer clear from getting involved in those kinds of threads.

My other quibble, which ties into something you wrote in your original post, is that I consider the feasibility of implementing the game design to be a vital part of the validity of the concept. If a game designer manages to make a beautifully crafted design document it's still worthless if it cannot be transformed into an actual game. Every single piece of research and development on a new piece of technology that must be completed for the success of your game adds another order to the costs and risks involved in the project, which is why an alarm goes off in my head when I read game proposals here that hinge on boatloads of them. I'm also a bit negative towards any game idea posted here that revolves around having a massive AAA game budget in order to work. I'm assuming everyone posting here is indie or small budget, as designers who work on the massive budget projects are generally experienced enough not to need the opinion of an amateur like myself. Hence you need to design within your capabilities and if your team consists of yourself and a few mates you need to design a game that you can actually build.

As long as we're discussing MMO RPG/RTS, I have an idea for how to make one actually work.

First of all, you would need a huge world and a maximum amount of people per server, about 1000.

When you first make your character, you begin in one of the capital cities, where you can do quests and stuff to develop your main character and earn money.

From the capital, you can recruit additional units into your army. At first you can only command fifty men, but as the game progresses you'll be able to head an army of up to one thousand.

You'll be allowed to start your own kingdom and build a castle after you've reached a certain point in the game, from that point you'll be allowed to join an alliance with other players, much like a guild and compete for territory. There will be a limit on how many kingdoms can be in one alliance.

One problem might be your castle being destroyed while you are logged off. To fix this, you might make it so that while logged off, your castle simply won't appear on the map, but enemies won't be able to build on your territory until you've been logged off for thirty days.

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Original post by falconhunter2020 /*stuff*/

this has the already mentioned problems of
1-massive system requirements
2-for 99% of the users their play experience will be getting annihilated by the 1% power gamers before they have more than 10 troops

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Original post by Kaze Quote: Original post by falconhunter2020 /*stuff*/ this has the already mentioned problems of 1-massive system requirements 2-for 99% of the users their play experience will be getting annihilated by the 1% power gamers before they have more than 10 troops

Well, for #1 I don't know what to tell you other than have bad graphics.

#2 however, is an easy fix. What you do is turn of PvP in certain areas, like in WoW, and make it so you can only attack players if they are within your level range, 5 above, 5 below.

Second of all, you would separate the RPG and RTS elements by making some areas where you can't build castles and you can't bring your troops, these areas are just for development of the main character and earning money. The other areas, the "open" areas, are where you can build and engage in the RTS element.

Lastly, you make the claim that there will be these god-kings that will rule the entire planet. There could simply be not only a maximum amount of soldiers, but a maximum amount of castles and territory that one player could control, as well as a maximum amount of players in an alliance. It would be very small, like ten. There would inevitably be powerful groups, but it would not be impossible to overthrow them.

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Original post by falconhunter2020 #2 /*#2 stuff*/

this might balance power a bit but now i think that you'd end up with the vast majority of player just getting to play a sub-par mmorpg and only a small minority actually get to play a decent rts game

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Original post by Kaze Quote: Original post by falconhunter2020 #2 /*#2 stuff*/ this might balance power a bit but now i think that you'd end up with the vast majority of player just getting to play a sub-par mmorpg and only a small minority actually get to play a decent rts game

I considered this too, which is why there would ba a relatively small maximum of players on any given server. Of course it would depend of the size of the world and the amount of open land, but 250 seems like a good number.

This way everyone gets to play the MMORPG and the RTS game, but we would be exaggerating the "Massive" part of the MMO acronym.

So, it's more a problem with ill thought out methods of handling a large and potentially unruly populous in a dynamic world than the entire notion of such a world that gets scoffed at?

That makes more sense. But we also have templates for rule systems that to work with large groups of people and balance individual freedoms between "societal" constraints. If you had a dynamic world, you'd probably want to have some laws nonetheless. Just not laws in the form of a simulation that isn't robust enough to allow experimentation: reasons for the player to not "go outside the lines."