MMORPG Design - Noncommercial = give up?
MMORPG design can be a very difficult task. And for those of us essentially developing a free mmo , this task becomes more difficult. As a grass roots team you likely will not have access to legions of programmers and artists, and the funds alotted to the project will certainly not reside in the millions. WoW (World of Warcraft) and other MMOs like UO (Ultima Online) all have professional development teams, and for their time set the bar in terms of graphics, gameplay and wide user appear. The games were not designed upon a "sustainable" model.....commercial producers can't possibly do this. They have to continually introduce new content, and eventually this new content will disrupt gameplay. They have their advertising and graphics and brand name to fall back on.....and we as free MMO or grassroots MMO developers do not often have this option.
Is everything lost? Should we just give up and go create a Dark Elf Wizard in the hopes of pwning some n00bs? You could of course, or you could look at the benefits of developing free mmos. There are several key advantages to not producing a commercial MMO such as WoW or UO, I will write a series of articles that deal with these benefits, but for the purposes of this post I'll focus on a prime advantage; namely the ability to fill a unique niche and do it well!
Free MMORPG Design -- A Unique Niche?
Commercial MMO developers have to be concerned about business models and "pleasing everyone". Anyone who's read a forum on the internet knows that no matter how sincere your effort, you can never please everyone. Great news at the grassroots level though...we don't have to do this! You can pick and audience and develop a product solely for it. A small example of this can be found on my UO RP server (TLEA: The Life Ever After -- http://www.tleauo.com). My team and I develop the server for players who love to be a part of a strong community and perform and promote high level roleplay. So immediately our emphasis must be placed on developing a strong and fairminded community that is polite and welcoming, as well as fostering an environment where freestyle and structured roleplay can flourish and players can be concerned about interacting, instead of protecting themselves from griefers. Seems very straightforward, and TLEA did indeed start off on the right foot.....but somewhere along the line we sacrifced some of our mission statement simply for a "player grab". As all "great" ideas, this crashed and burned, and served as a powerful learning experience for us. It was interesting to observe the effects of laxing our orignial mission statement. The community quickly became tainted by individuals looking to impose their will on others, and interestingly enough....the quality of roleplay in game was diminished.
I bring my server up only to serve as a prime example of why niche development is so vital to a grassroot or free mmorpg. Using the Ultima Online Engine, we did not have pretty graphics to fall back on, we did not have a brand name that was established yet....and it was suprising to see the effects when we diluted our niche. Players left, and those who took their place were often not very fitting to the original shard vision. Luckily we were able to evaulate our issues and took measures to reverse our mistakes (all a part of the process, and any mmo devs out there will agree with me I'm sure) and were able to foster a community that was in many regards much stronger than the initial community. Now mind you we are still in need of growth (who isnt? :P) but for the first time we have a rock solid core to build on. This is of course in no small part because of our players, but for the purposes of this post, sticking to our mission statement really brought back the strength of the community, and weeded out the weakness.
In short, create an environment that -you- would want to play in. If you love high action PvP and intense interactions with other players, then design for that. If you love light and fluffy play that everyone can handle and everyone benefits off of, then design for that. If you know what you are looking for in a niche, you'll know how to develop for it. Chances are if you have gone so far as to design your own mmo on whatever engine, then the niche you are looking for has not yet been filled....so why not fill it?
WoW has pretty graphics.... and UO has a huge brand name.... what do I have?
You may not have the "bells and whistles" to fall back on should your MMO design be on the weaker side....the good news is...these are NOT the key to a sustainably successful MMO. Clever game design and community integration appear to be the most vital aspects to an MMO that develops a strong following.
So...with this in mind make sure you are really sitting down to plan out what exactly makes your MMO different from "the rest". In nearly every field you will have competitors. I myself am in the "hardcore rp" UO shard market......there are several strong competitors in this field, and going head to head with all of them...is less than clever. They all have their strengths, and they all have their flaws......they key is to make yourself stand strong in the shadow of your competitors flaws, and really create a brand around what you offer, instead of trying to follow suit in some sort of virtual "Arms Race" of scripts and maps and art. Players love bells and whistles, but they forget about them a week after they start playing. If you don't have solid principles ingrained into the MMO, you might be in trouble.
A key element that most MMOs are missing.....is the ability to interact with other players in game. This is the most fundamental aspect of any MMORPG or MMO. It is what differentiates these games from simple RPGs or other games. People play these games because they want to be surrounded by real people! Thus it becomes paramount that you develop your MMO so that you maximize the amount that players have to interact, and you also need to ensure that these interactions are beneficial. Players will also find the path of least resistance....that being the fastest way to gain power, wealth, skills, loot etc. You should aniticipate this no matter what.....it doesn't make players evil, but you cannot expect an altruistic attitude. Players want to play a game, and have fun while doing it....they don't always want to build a project and they will not see things with the same pair of eyes that you as a developer see the project with.
Beneficial interactions will make players interact more often, and a quirky side effect of this is that they will make more friends, and more enemies, and become more and more entangled in the world and the community at large. This will create "staying power". Once you have this.....players may bring their friends and they will be even less likely to leave. Minimizing players that leave is how you grow your MMO.
One thing we are experimenting with right now on TLEA, is creating in game dependencies. We split the field in two for simplicity....Adventurer, and Townie. An adventurer is one who loves to go out on...well adventures. They love to explore new areas, fight new enemies, solve puzzles etc. The townie loves to hang around the towns/cities of the game, and interact with people. More often than not they take skills that allow them to stay relatively close to town...(crafters, merchants etc). These two sides can often appear to be on the opposite side of the coin nearly at all times. A great way to bring them together...is to create dependency on eachother. The adventurers will need gear to go out on adventures, and the Townies will need resources to create new items. This gives us an avenue to explore.
By allowing the adventurers to collect ingredients that are used in crafting, and then allowing the crafter to create interesting items (better than found loot) for adventurers, a constant circle of interaction is formed. Adventurers will need gear, so they will farm for ingredients while adventuring, and the townies will need the ingredients and thus will continue to make gear for the adventurers to pay for more ingredients.
This allows both worlds to interact, and to mutually benefit from one another. Explore different types of play style separation, and see if you can't create dependencies on other types of play styles, you might just be suprised what you find.
I'd love to hear of dependencies that you yourself have created, or are thinking about creating. I'm writing this blog to bring free MMO designers together, so don't be afraid to leave comments and post your ideas up for discussion, I'd love to hear what you have to say.
Cheers!
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Sunday, May 24, 2009
MMO Economy Design
Defining an MMO Economy
One of the hardest parts about designing an MMO (massive multiplayer online game) economy is that people, myself included have a difficult time defining the scope of the economy they wish to design. It's not common to design a real world global market with all the ins and outs of our real life economy and then plop this into an MMO. Your players/consumers are not likely to be economists (though some may very well be!) so one should aim for a system that has an elegance to it. By this I simply mean a system that is robust, allows for players/consumers to approach it in various ways and to sink or swim based on their own merit, instead of predetermined choices.
I will define the economy my staff and I are currently working on in general terms. Please bear with me that I run an Ultima Online Server....and thus am biased towards this flavour of things. I will try to generalize where I can (as we are all not designing UO servers....which is a pity as the world would be a better place).
Classic economic engines especially on nearly every UO server work on the same Resource Generation vs Item Black-hole design. That is resources or items are generated as players encounter them from nothingness, and at the end of their lifecycle they are deleted and removed from the game world. This works in theory, but is often plagued by pitfalls such as item farming, item hoarding and game soloing. All of these severely undermine the economical engine of the game, and often lead to a malfunctioning economy. This is known as an open economy. Content is generated from nothing and fades into nothing over time.
What we on TLEA: The Life Ever After are attempting to do is to create a more closed economic model.
The Closed Economic Model for MMOs
The closed model differs in a key way from the Open Model described above. The closed model attempts to allow the world to run on a set number of resources. For example there may only be 1000 minted gold coins in the game. They don't decay, they don't go away. So it's up to players to interact in whatever way they can to attain wealth. This way some will be rich, some will be poor, and whoever is offering services can make coin, while those who are consuming services will spend coin.
It's a very interesting system as it allows different layers of control to be exerted. If you want to simulate a depression, you can do that but affecting the circulation of gold in the game. You can stop trade between cities, or declare a war. And as bridges are burned, money will stop circulating. You also have more power to "fix" a crashing economy (hey it happens in real life too. America's main man Pres Barak Obama is currently dealing with this....and I thought I had a difficult task ahead of me to get an economy functioning on my shard! sheesh). You can inject money into the mix, you can maximize interactions and allow the money to flow freely again. This will soften up the economy and get things moving once more.
Originally this was the sort of engine we set out to create. Sadly MMO players like to "do" things with their spare time....and don't always like to work. (Why play a game then!? :P). Players love to dungeon crawl for loot, or interact with eachother, or craft things for the hell of it. This is where the problems of a closed system come into play. Loot is a huge problem. Players love finding interesting things. Remember Diablo? Well I do...and I loved seeing what each monster dropped. You want loot to be dynamic, and at the same time you cannot sacrifice your economic model...or you risk economic collapse. What we are exploring right now is having "loot" simply be non-combat role consumables, or various collectables. This way players are not directly adventuring to "farm" cash. Instead they are acquiring resources which they can later sell....and because it's a resource and not coin they have....their sales will be subject to supply and demand. The beautiful thing is...you don't even really have to code an engine to deal with this. Players will automatically work on supply and demand. Buyers will only pay what they think something is worth, sellers will have to drop their prices to accomodate. No one is going to pay 1 million gold for a heap of dirt....especially if you can dig it up anywhere on the map.
But...you can't opt to NOT give loot to players. You also need to allow people to save money. So inflation will just naturally happen. You can't mint 1000 gold and let that be that. Player-bases grow (hopefully ...right?) and as it does more money will be required.
Thus the pure closed model may not quite fit in an MMO environment. But what about a Hybrid?
The Hybrid Economic Model for MMOs
So...open models and closed models both have their problems. What if we combine the two concepts?
My staff and I are currently moving in this direction, to develop a hybrid model on which we can base a robust and simple economy off of. Under this model we allow for some content generation, and we implement a few black holes....but by and large we attempt to keep currency in game and constantly moving.
Here is a quick picture modelling the flow of cash and services.
Under this model cash originates from our "Royalty" or simply put, the town Rulers. This allows a strong foundation, and one that makes sense rp-wise (always a bonus). The system needs to be kickstarted by having Royalty purchase services from the playerbase. They may purchase resources from gatherers, or items from crafters or hire mercenaries from the adventurers...whatever you may think of. At this point small taxes are installed. Such as renting a bigger bank box, or accessing valuable crafting tools or resource areas, also things such as House rentables. This ensures that money is constantly being drained from the playerbase as they acquire services, and is being supplied back into the town leadership. This way players have a constant drive to continue to supply services.....and this equates to "things to do" in game.
We're very close to implementing the system...and it's quite shard specific at the moment so there's no use for me to go into much detail.
But...being a new blogger, I'd love feedback if you read this. Let me know what you think of the ideas, do you have ideas of your own? We can address them in future posts. I love to hear what other MMO developers are thinking, and what they've tried.
Cheers everyone and thanks for reading!
Mideon Quo
Administrator
TLEA: The Life Ever After
http://www.tleauo.com
One of the hardest parts about designing an MMO (massive multiplayer online game) economy is that people, myself included have a difficult time defining the scope of the economy they wish to design. It's not common to design a real world global market with all the ins and outs of our real life economy and then plop this into an MMO. Your players/consumers are not likely to be economists (though some may very well be!) so one should aim for a system that has an elegance to it. By this I simply mean a system that is robust, allows for players/consumers to approach it in various ways and to sink or swim based on their own merit, instead of predetermined choices.
I will define the economy my staff and I are currently working on in general terms. Please bear with me that I run an Ultima Online Server....and thus am biased towards this flavour of things. I will try to generalize where I can (as we are all not designing UO servers....which is a pity as the world would be a better place).
Classic economic engines especially on nearly every UO server work on the same Resource Generation vs Item Black-hole design. That is resources or items are generated as players encounter them from nothingness, and at the end of their lifecycle they are deleted and removed from the game world. This works in theory, but is often plagued by pitfalls such as item farming, item hoarding and game soloing. All of these severely undermine the economical engine of the game, and often lead to a malfunctioning economy. This is known as an open economy. Content is generated from nothing and fades into nothing over time.
What we on TLEA: The Life Ever After are attempting to do is to create a more closed economic model.
The Closed Economic Model for MMOs
The closed model differs in a key way from the Open Model described above. The closed model attempts to allow the world to run on a set number of resources. For example there may only be 1000 minted gold coins in the game. They don't decay, they don't go away. So it's up to players to interact in whatever way they can to attain wealth. This way some will be rich, some will be poor, and whoever is offering services can make coin, while those who are consuming services will spend coin.
It's a very interesting system as it allows different layers of control to be exerted. If you want to simulate a depression, you can do that but affecting the circulation of gold in the game. You can stop trade between cities, or declare a war. And as bridges are burned, money will stop circulating. You also have more power to "fix" a crashing economy (hey it happens in real life too. America's main man Pres Barak Obama is currently dealing with this....and I thought I had a difficult task ahead of me to get an economy functioning on my shard! sheesh). You can inject money into the mix, you can maximize interactions and allow the money to flow freely again. This will soften up the economy and get things moving once more.
Originally this was the sort of engine we set out to create. Sadly MMO players like to "do" things with their spare time....and don't always like to work. (Why play a game then!? :P). Players love to dungeon crawl for loot, or interact with eachother, or craft things for the hell of it. This is where the problems of a closed system come into play. Loot is a huge problem. Players love finding interesting things. Remember Diablo? Well I do...and I loved seeing what each monster dropped. You want loot to be dynamic, and at the same time you cannot sacrifice your economic model...or you risk economic collapse. What we are exploring right now is having "loot" simply be non-combat role consumables, or various collectables. This way players are not directly adventuring to "farm" cash. Instead they are acquiring resources which they can later sell....and because it's a resource and not coin they have....their sales will be subject to supply and demand. The beautiful thing is...you don't even really have to code an engine to deal with this. Players will automatically work on supply and demand. Buyers will only pay what they think something is worth, sellers will have to drop their prices to accomodate. No one is going to pay 1 million gold for a heap of dirt....especially if you can dig it up anywhere on the map.
But...you can't opt to NOT give loot to players. You also need to allow people to save money. So inflation will just naturally happen. You can't mint 1000 gold and let that be that. Player-bases grow (hopefully ...right?) and as it does more money will be required.
Thus the pure closed model may not quite fit in an MMO environment. But what about a Hybrid?
The Hybrid Economic Model for MMOs
So...open models and closed models both have their problems. What if we combine the two concepts?
My staff and I are currently moving in this direction, to develop a hybrid model on which we can base a robust and simple economy off of. Under this model we allow for some content generation, and we implement a few black holes....but by and large we attempt to keep currency in game and constantly moving.
Here is a quick picture modelling the flow of cash and services.
Under this model cash originates from our "Royalty" or simply put, the town Rulers. This allows a strong foundation, and one that makes sense rp-wise (always a bonus). The system needs to be kickstarted by having Royalty purchase services from the playerbase. They may purchase resources from gatherers, or items from crafters or hire mercenaries from the adventurers...whatever you may think of. At this point small taxes are installed. Such as renting a bigger bank box, or accessing valuable crafting tools or resource areas, also things such as House rentables. This ensures that money is constantly being drained from the playerbase as they acquire services, and is being supplied back into the town leadership. This way players have a constant drive to continue to supply services.....and this equates to "things to do" in game.
We're very close to implementing the system...and it's quite shard specific at the moment so there's no use for me to go into much detail.
But...being a new blogger, I'd love feedback if you read this. Let me know what you think of the ideas, do you have ideas of your own? We can address them in future posts. I love to hear what other MMO developers are thinking, and what they've tried.
Cheers everyone and thanks for reading!
Mideon Quo
Administrator
TLEA: The Life Ever After
http://www.tleauo.com
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