quote: Original post by Dauntless
Yes, you can eliminate some cheaters or some particularly obnoxious player killers, but in the end....who are the police and even more importantly who are the guiders of events? Some genres will not necessitate this, as the freedom of action is bound by the context of the rules....sports for example. But if its an RPG, or a FPS, or something in which limits of action and direction are not explicitly defined, I think it''s headed for trouble.

I wonder how much grief could be caused in an MMO-Puzzle by PKers... Seriously, though, good server configuration tools and voluntary "Enforcers" or "PeaceKeepers" (much like moderators here on GDNet) should make this less of an issue.

quote:
I personally don''t play MMO''s for that very reason. I honest to God think that some people are addicted to this style of gaming precisely because there are no limits. And when I mean addicted, I''m not talking potato chip style addiction, I''m talking spending 6+ hours a day playing kind of addiction.

I don''t approve of the unhealthy addiction some people seem to have to these games either, but that''s the fault of the individual, not the game. If you know that whenever you play you end up playing, say, 12 hours straight, then play less often. Current games are based on commerce and as such want to give players incentive to get as much as possible out of their subscriptions, so players binge. If the service was free (see next paragraph) and the only cost was the upfront price of the software, this might be less of a problem.

quote:
But there''s still one other concern. Since this is a service oriented paradigm, you have to shell out money to play after you buy the game.

In its current incarnation, yes. However, I''m interested in a distribution/use model more like current FPS deathmatch hosts. Any consumer with the time, server space and bandwidth (interest being a given) should be able to host an MMO-environment. While you may wonder how one person can possibly host anything on the scale of, say, EverQuest, if you consider the MMO Puzzle idea at the top of the page it should be quite possible to host a few hundred to a few thousand simultaneous puzzle solvers.

Also, as advances continue to be made in distributed processing, someone may find a way for several consumers to collectively host a world, the status, geometry and other details of various users being primarily processed and routed through the server to which they originally connected, even though they may be visiting a realm ostensibly "hosted" by another. Distributed processing may also make it possible to use the gamer''s local machine as more than a display device. Some processing specific to the gamer alone might also be done on the local machine.

*Sigh*... I wish I had a LAN.

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Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!

quote:
Also, as advances continue to be made in distributed processing, someone may find a way for several consumers to collectively host a world, the status, geometry and other details of various users being primarily processed and routed through the server to which they originally connected, even though they may be visiting a realm ostensibly "hosted" by another. Distributed processing may also make it possible to use the gamer''s local machine as more than a display device. Some processing specific to the gamer alone might also be done on the local machine.

If I''m not mistaken (which I could very well be, I read this ages ago), Neverwinter Nights is (or at least was - haven''t kept up to date on this title) doing something a little like this - each server contains its own little part of the game world, players do their stuff as usual. Each server (or section of game world) is connected by ''gates'' whereby if a player wants to enter a different game section (server), they enter the gate, I guess select the new server, and relevant info gets copied across.

A few different configuration options exist here - either the server has the gates disabled, whereby its game world is the extreme boundary. A limited number of servers are connected, whereby players can only venture to the servers configured at each gate (thereby hosting a larger game world on a set number of servers). Or open slather where players could enter any server (if they know the IP address) that has the gate option fully enabled.

That''s just a basic run down of it, but I don''t see why it couldn''t be applied to many different MMO paradigms.

There are a few issues you''d need to overcome, such as interaction between players from different servers (is development on one server easier than another?), but that''s what the option to only allow travel between pre-configured connecting servers is for... a large gameworld can be independently created that still has balance.

Just food for thought...

Oluseyi-
You''re probably right about players binging due to money factors. Sort of like a buffet mentality...if the players are going to fork over 13$/month, they may as well get their money''s worth by spending as much time as possible on it.

Lord knows back in the metered days of the net, I used to watch my time online very carefully. When it went unlimited, at first I binged (especially on IRC), but then I realized what a waste it was.

I certainly hope MMO style games introduce some sort of moderators as this would quell most of my concerns about them. Again, some genres simply won''t need them because the actions of the players will be bound to certain rules and limits. It''s the freewill freeform style of MMO''s that concern me without the presence of moderators.

quote: Original post by Dauntless
Yes, you can eliminate some cheaters or some particularly obnoxious player killers, but in the end....who are the police and even more importantly who are the guiders of events? Some genres will not necessitate this, as the freedom of action is bound by the context of the rules....sports for example. But if its an RPG, or a FPS, or something in which limits of action and direction are not explicitly defined, I think it''s headed for trouble. Imagine what this forum would be like without moderators...or IRC. I think that eventually, the outlawness of MMO''s will have to place some kind of moderator or GM to put order. Otherwise MMO will be considered just a fancy IRC client , with no Ops to boot.

Agreed, moderators is a must.

quote: I wonder how much grief could be caused in an MMO-Puzzle by PKers... Seriously, though, good server configuration tools and voluntary "Enforcers" or "PeaceKeepers" (much like moderators here on GDNet) should make this less of an issue.

Simple, I hoard all the important pieces so nobody can complete their puzzle. And if they do want to finish the puzzle they must go through me to get the pieces. It''s not PKers, it''s the general people out there that wants to cause grief to others. Volunteer also have some problems too; they are very likely to get corrupted. And they could actually turn out to be the ones that cheats the most by taking in private money in exchange for special bonus to others.

Neverwinter Nights is like DiabloII Open Bnet Servers. The illegal hacks will be every where as soon as the game comes out I promise you. And each game will be only as good as the DM(real person, not AI) is able to maintain it. I doubt you will ever see any Neverwinter Nights server hosting more than 1,000 players without charging a monthly fee.

Dauntless:
I was just glancing over an "old" review of the Sci-Fi MMORPG Neocron, and the mention of the "Law Enforcer" implant caught my eye. It''s an optional component available to all players that makes it impossible for other players to hurt them, or them to hurt other players. That should take care of griefers.

Mooglez:
The solution to that is trivial. Don''t allow hoarding of pieces. A player can only have one piece in their possession. Throw in a time limit, bonuses for percentage completion and penalties for "idling" and the puzzle game is safe.

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Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!

There will always be problems. The task is continually finding solutions to them.

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Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!

Oluseyi,

What a great life philosophy that makes
Would actually be a good sig, mind if I use it?

About the mmo paradigm, think of cards.

"What? Cards you say? Aren''t those those rectangle shaped pieces of paper that people toss around when they are bored?"

Yes, cards. Playing cards is a very simple thing, and makes a good example I think.

"But, really... CARDS?!!!"

Yeah. You can play solitare, or you can play poker. Which is funner?

"Solitare"

You anti-social nerd!

"I aint no nerd!"

But you play games with yourself.

See, multiplayer provides a very needed social interaction in gaming which doesnt exist in single player.

"But your just talking about multiplayer games, not MMOG!"

What, aren''t they the same thing?

"No! multiplayer games you play in short bursts, MMOG you play with lots of people lots of the time!"

MMO just means it''s massively multiplayer, and it provides the multiplayer through the internet.

"What about persistant worlds?"

Well, persistant worlds are one aspect of MMO games, where things you do when playing can affect the world and social dynamic.





Your right I am. Anyway, my point is, I think MMO can provide much needed social activity to just about any game. Puzzle games would be awesome massively multiplayer. It would take some thought, but you wouldn''t need to pay to serve it because you would get the players to serve it. A puzzle game wouldn''t require too much bandwidth. So you probably wouldn''t need to charge a monthly fee.

There may be problems with cheaters and hackers and mean players, but there always are problems with those people.

But racing, fighting, puzzle, rpg, adventure?, survival horror, sports, action, platformer. I think there would be a benefit for all games to be online. It''s another dimension for some genres. Now, most of them wouldn''t really need PERSISTANT worlds, as rpgs do. And I think there will always be a strong need for single player games too, with well thought out stories, and closed controllable systems. There are people who like to be antisocial every once in a while.

But mmo is workable for any game, I think.

Feel free to use anything I say as you please - including ideas on this board and elsewhere. I use yours...

Cards is actually an excellent example of a type of game that would benefit from the MMO paradigm. Poker. Spades. Do you have any idea how many people go online daily to play Spades at Yahoo! ?

Remember the Mel Gibson movie Maverick? Remember how there was to be a big poker tournament at the end? Taking card games MMO would make it possible for anybody to take part in such a tournament at any point in time.

Keep ''em coming folks!

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Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!

quote: Original post by Oluseyi
Cards is actually an excellent example of a type of game that would benefit from the MMO paradigm. Poker. Spades. Do you have any idea how many people go online daily to play Spades at Yahoo! ?

Remember the Mel Gibson movie Maverick? Remember how there was to be a big poker tournament at the end? Taking card games MMO would make it possible for anybody to take part in such a tournament at any point in time.

That''s pretty well been done with poker already... check out www.pokerroom.com - plenty of social interaction, I think they do tournaments too... haven''t been there for a while, but I''ve wasted so much time at that site

quote: There will always be problems. The task is continually finding solutions to them.

Ah... the nerf baton rears it''s mighty head.

There are some things that can be more eaily turned into MMO games (role-playing), others that will be more difficult (sports, action, strategy).

If you played the MMO version (beta) of Mechwarrior, you can see where some methods of dealing with the most dangerous MMORTS/FPS combo games are (large group of players jumping in at 8pm and staying on for a few hours eventually completely dominating a game world only to lose it a few hours later when another faction does the same thing). I think they overdid it though... takes too long to really do anything in that game.

I''ve got some ideas for strategy games and ranking systems giving players more control over the overall direction of their faction (race, empire, whatever). WW2OL has demonstrated that you can''t plan on any particular level of enemy action though. Germany, who should by all rights, be stomping all over France here early in the war, has been stuck just inside the border. Maybe they should have called it WW1OL, as that''s the results that they''re getting.

The semi-distributed computing model for playing some of the games (like Sims online or something like that) would potentially be a very nice idea, adding in all of the modules and allowing someone to run scripts for their ''Sims''. Of course, the scripts would have to run on the local machine and not on the server, or you would end up with the problem of people not being online but an hour a day and taking up loads of processing power on the servers. You can start out with a single guy who would go get a job and then go out at night to the Sim clubs, hitting on chics (1/2 of them just Simbots probably). It would basically be a better version of IRC if you like. No PKs, no grief players and very few k3w1 d00d5 that are so entertaining (NOT!!!).

The genre has a lot of potential growth, but it has to be done carefully or else it could end up just being more of the same over and over and over again. Of course, that''s probably what will happen anyway.

The part that I really don''t understand though is that there are around a 1/2 dozen of these projects that have been canceled now, but the basic fact that with one notable exception (AO), none of them have really done poorly and have all been relatively successful (AO being the exception because of actual execution). Yeah, AC isn''t the greatest, but it was successful enough to where M$ wants the company that did the first one to build another one. UO probably made easily enough money to pay for itself two or three times over. EQ we don''t even need to mention. DAoC needs more non-PvP content, but is still a decent game that, last I checked, is doing rather well and has probably already pulled a profit, including development costs. Then again, some of these projects haven''t been cancelled and they maybe should have been.