And that is basically the problem of all matchmaking systems. Everybody wants to win more than half of his games, but that simply isn't possible. Either you switch to a PvE system in which the computer doesn't mind losing, or you accept that the optimum outcome of a perfect matchmaking system is a 50:50 win chance. The only game I know that comes close to this perfect equilibrium is World of Tanks, and lots of players complain that their win chance isn't higher than 50% in that game.

Let us speak today of MMO websites.  I visit loads of official MMO websites, both for work and my personal interest, and it is absolutely appalling how many of them appear to be slapped together by Geocities monkeys from 1998 with no greater understanding of what such a website should do or offer.  I often find myself very frustrated when I’m trying to find some basic information, the latest news, or God forbid, an RSS feed.  You’d be surprised how many official websites do not have an RSS feed.  It’s like they’re in denial about modern technology even while running a highly sophisticated game.

Rivs from A High Latency Life might be best-known for his… erm… provocative pictures he likes to put up with each of his posts.  I gave him one of the most fun assignments I could think of: To pick the worst TV show to make an MMO from — and then speculate how he would make it work as a game.

When Syp asked me to write a post about the Worst TV show to make an MMO from, and how the mechanics would work. I thought long and hard, oh I thought of cartoons. Maybe a Carebear MMO, that would really empty out WoW, but the fact is I loved a lot of the older TV shows. How cool would a Thundercats MMO would be? This was going to be harder than I thought.

Normally, if I was contracted to do an MMO design, I would almost entirely ignore the “world” and focus on “making the most fun game possible.” A common successful approach to making a fun game is to divide and conquer: first you make the game fun in tiny 30-to-60 second chunks. When you’re confident that the lowest-level thing you do in your game is fun to do over and over and over, then you step back and make a fifteen-minute “fun loop” (or some similar time window). Thus in WoW, killing a monster might take 30 seconds, but completing a quest takes 15 minutes. These are loops: you are rewarded for completing them and are then pushed toward doing the loop again.

This is a very effective way to make a highly directed game. I’ve used it before with success, and I will no doubt use it again in the future. I’m not knocking this method. But it’s not a good approach if you want the game to have more “world” in it.

MMOs are games where you play combat primarily in the user interface rather than the game world.
I think this is best realised in the classic ‘standing in the fire’ error of new raiders: essentially people stand in the fire because it is an element of playing in the game world, where levelling-up has trained those players to instead play in the interface. Combat is in the cooldowns; you watch timers, health bars, debuff bars, and only when you get to raiding or the more ambitious small group dungeons do you need to start looking into the game world too, in order to step out of the fire, dodge the laser beam, jump over the furious shrew of ruin.

Non-traditional engagements are, to say the least, pretty awesome. Why be boring, take a knee, and propose to your love in some stupid restaurant? Pft, lame. Far better is a recent proposal between two gamers (and, full disclosure, great friends of mine) in City of Heroes (the whole episode has been conveniently put into comic book form by the fiance himself, if you scroll down). Lead designer at Paragon Studios, Melissa “War Witch” Bianco, who made the in-game proposal happen, had perfect reaction to the idea: "I thought, 'Wow, that is freaking COOL!'"

If you’ve been keeping up with the indie game world recently, you would have heard of a game called Minecraft. For those who haven’t, Minecraft is a sandbox-style game where players can use different materials to create and destroy worlds as they please. It’s multiplayer, allowing for online collaboration, and some of the structures, cities, and makeshift games that the players have made are truly spectacular.

Can you perfectly predict the weather? No, because it’s too complex — the “chaos factor” makes it impossible to perfectly predict. The same holds true of the balance of any modern MMO. This may be surprising. We create every aspect of MMOs, so why can’t we perfectly predict them? It turns out that the “chaos factor” in an MMO comes very quickly too — much more quickly than players realize — and there’s no way to model the entire possibility space

I got married yesterday, but only in virtual life, and not to somebody else: I married my main character and my second character in A Tale in the Desert. ATitD probably has the most extreme implementation of marriage in any MMORPG: If you are married to somebody, you have complete access to all of his possessions, and you can even log on as him. That is great for mule characters, but requires a big amount of trust when marrying another person. Worst case scenario is a bad divorce where your angry spouse first takes all your belongings and destroys your house before hitting the divorce button.

I make fun of systems designers a lot because I am one. I wear a lot of hats, and I actually love to code, but deep down, it’s all about the game systems.

People who think like me are really useful to have on your MMO team. They won’t just dig into the guts of your game, they will revel in the guts of your game, sorting them this way and that, modeling them in myriad ways. This will, generally, result in a better product.

But they won’t ever come to the producer and say, “Okay! The balancing is all finished!” Trust me: that will never happen.

Diary of a Second Life trainwreck

Dear Blizzard; I’ve been enjoying your game for quite some time now — nearly six years in fact. That’s an awfully long time for a video game to hold my interest, so congratulations on producing a game that is engaging enough to do so. Hooray! But you know, I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about this silly thing you’ve implemented called Real ID. I’m sure you’ve been getting a lot of feedback on it already, but seriously, stick around. This is worth reading, this right here.

There’s been some discussion about death penalties lately, and I figured it was a good opportunity to discuss some issues with death penalties in MMOs, and penalties in games in general from a game design point of view. So, let’s take a look at this topic and see how many flamewars we can fan!