Ironically, those voices were the same people who happily handed Tan money for the credits I provided. Happily handed me stacks of cash for Jedi accounts. Did I help in the demise of SWG? Yes. That is something I accepted long ago. The game that I loved so much, I helped to destroy

I’ve had nagging doubts because the MMO isn’t where I want it to be. It doesn’t feel quite “there.” You know the secret sauce that would take it from being a wacky EQ1-era game into its own unique thing? There’s not enough of that sauce.

If I was making this game the normal way you make games, what I would focus on now is combat innovation. I’ve got pretty typical classic MMO combat at the moment.

MMOClash reports a financial analyst downgraded Activision Blizzard stock from "buy" to "neutral" based on an online survey with 381 gamer participants. Now personally I wouldn't buy Activision Blizzard shares; their main cash cow is aging, and the games business is extremely volatile. But I do have doubts whether accurate financial forecasts can be achieved by asking a few hundred gamers.

Ein Spiel braucht interaktive Momente, um seiner Definition gerecht zu werden. Die Erzeugung eines Spielsystems aber, eines Agierens in mathematischen Möglichkeiten also, ist eine sehr abstrakte Angelegenheit. Um die Einstiegshürden zu senken, die Befremdnis zu verringern und damit massenkompatibler zu werden, muss es sich an bekannte Medien anschmiegen und Gekanntes, Geschätztes und Verstandenes übernehmen. Was liegt da näher, als das Medium Film in das Computerspiel einzubauen. Leider verträgt sich die sekündlich getimte und perspektivisch eingeschränkte Form des Filmes nicht sonderlich gut mit dem auf Freiheit und interaktiver Errechnung scheinbar zufälliger Ereignisse getrimmten Wesen eines Spieles.

I’m a big fan of your work and reader of your blog. You probably don’t remember me but I briefly met you at GDC Online last year. I was looking for Dr. Richard Bartle, who I did find and conducted an interview with.
A few months ago I released the interview on my Youtube Partner account but forgot to mention to you that I had done so. I thought you might be interested in it.

Syp chimes in on the SWTOR morality debate with a very optimistic comment: "Plus, wouldn’t it be really cool if BioWare makes these choices and stories so compelling that it tears people away from grinding light/darkside points to do what they want to do?" Yes, Syp, that would be really cool. But, from my personal experience with gamers and developers, that isn't going to happen.

A "perfect" story for me would be one in which good and evil are so perfectly balanced that my natural choices would end me up somewhere in the grey area of the morality spectrum. That is where I see most people in real life ending up if judged by a jedi system of beliefs. I certainly am no un-emotional jedi of pure goodness and control over mind and body.

Unless Bioware adds grey morality gear to the game, which isn't planned, and frankly unlikely, following a grey story will disqualify players from wearing any morality gear. And I expect there to be some very cool morality gear which you can only wear if you are at the extreme ends of the scale. 99 out of 100 gamers will thus go into "let's optimize the fun out of this" mode. They won't even *read* the possible responses to some moral dilemma. They'll just automatically chose the one which is marked as giving the right points for the cool gear they are after. And that is where the story-based MMORPG gameplay will utterly fail.

This was my talk delivered yesterday at Casual Connect Seattle — somewhat shorter than my usual, as it was a 25 minute slot. The topic was designing for games-as-a-service; a lot of folks are migrating from casual games into social games right now, and need to know more about what the design best practices are.
I ended up reaching back to the Laws of Online World Design and many other older materials both mine and of others, on the grounds that it was likely to be new and perhaps educational for many who have been doing fire-and-forget software in the casual space.
I am fairly sure that the conference will be posting video of the presentation — they normally do — so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, here’s the deck in a few formats

WoW Should Have Died

Let me put it another way: our industry’s “common sense” tells us that WoW should have flopped when it launched. It was the most expensive launch fiasco we’d ever seen!

Common sense says you don’t recover from mega-sized technical disasters. As evidence, we have a long slew of failed games before and after WoW, which we write off as “Oh, of course they failed, their launch was poor.” We still believe that getting the launch right is critically important to a AAA-level MMO’s success.

For many online gamers, crafting has become an integral part of the gaming experience. Countless hours are spent in the arduous pursuit of reaching the pinnacle of crafting achievement. The rewards for crafting can be very generous indeed: incredible gear and weapons, the ability to generate incredible amounts of gold in-game, and having fellow gamers clamor for your specialty services to help them become the fully-equipped juggernauts of their dreams. However, there can be quite a downside for crafting in that the gamer may face long hours of endless grinding for the raw materials needed and there are other pitfalls that may incur based upon the game’s crafting system itself.

So how is the view from way up here? It’s great actually -- we’re really happy with how Cataclysm is going so far, and we have big surprises on the horizon. On the other hand, there are details you can see at ground level that you can’t make out from 10,000 feet.

When we started these blogs, the idea was to foster developer communication to the players without some of the inherent problems of posting in forums. Some players have pointed out recently, and we totally agree, that the blogs up until now have been from a very high vantage point. We looked for topics with universal interest that would feel important and newsworthy. That has worked overall, but we also feel like we’ve lost something from when I used to be down in the metaphorical trenches talking to players in the forums.

MUD: Messrs Bartle and Trubshaw's Astonishing Contrivance by Bartle, Richard (GDC Online 2010)

OK. It’s Friday night and I admit I’ve had a drink or possibly two already, which means that I’m in a mood for talking and sharing, possibly more than I normally would. But sharing is a bit of the point of blogging, isn't it?

There won't be any pretence or cover-up. This is the truth, the reality the way it is, including cracks and less-than-perfect. But even if this post starts in misery, I assure you it will get much better towards the end. Don’t worry. Just have a seat and a pint and relax while I'm sharing my story, OK? And don't forget I love my guild.

Now let's get started, shall we? (Larísa fills a pint to the brim and heads for her favorite armchair, takes a sip and clears her throat before speaking up.)

Eyewitness Accounts of MMO Hacks, Griefs, and Cheats on a Grand Scale
Put enough people in one place and sooner or later someone will test the boundaries. MMORPGs are no exception. Ranging from the hilariously frivolous to the monetarily disastrous, here are five stories of player-fueled negativity that have made an indelible mark on massively multiplayer gaming, plus a bonus interview of gamers taking extraordary steps to restore one MMORPG to its former glory.

The Assassination of Lord British

Manchmal muss man die User einfach überraschen: #communitymanagement #blizzard #epic

Within the MMOG industry there are two primary server structures employed to house the player base: Separated shards of some sort (typically referred to as 'servers' though this is misleading from a hardware standpoint) and a more unified, single-world structure. Primary examples of each are World of Warcraft, which employs a shard-based structure that breaks its considerable population into separate worlds, and EVE Online which houses its entire player base in a single universe.

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

The short summary: Undead Labs, the studio founded by a few ex-ArenaNet employees, recently hired on a one Mr. Richard Foge as a game designer. Foge’s first public act as a dev and employee was to come out with an oddly provocative manifesto in which he bashes MMOs, puts down PCs, wishes upon a star, and tells us how awesome action console games are. From a journalistic standpoint, it’s full of unbelievable money quotes; from a player standpoint, it’s kind of off-putting and even trollish

On paper, it sounds like business suicide. Offer up the core of your gameworld and a wealth of its content for free, to anyone willing to give it a taste test. Its roots are in the ’90s, an extension of the razor blades business model, emerging in gaming from the need to combat piracy in certain territories. It found its way into the west most memorably in Jagex’s RuneScape, an MMORPG that launched, completely free for registrants, in 2001. Free-to-play is a draw for one big reason: the numbers add up.

I’ve played a lot of Travian over the last few years and perhaps one of the first things you learn as a Travian player is that one player on an account is not enough to be competitive. In my recent mini-return to Everquest 2, this has got me thinking of how this would work in an MMORPG. Granted, MMOs don’t have quite the time constraint as a 24/7 strategy war game would, but they do still consume an awful lot of time if you want to be a hardcore raider.

[In this much-referenced technical piece originally published in Game Developer magazine late last year, the team behind idiosyncratic MMO success EVE Online discusses precisely why sharing a single world between all of its players makes sense.]

Some days I'm just in an odd mood. As poor Vanesta found out. A few months ago when we were planning out the in-game loot items for the upcoming Legends of Norrath set (the online trading card game that ties in with EQ and EQII) I had another of those moments. I'd been working on Tinkerfest quests at the time (a gnomish festival of all things clockwork that comes around once a year) and so I suggested something along those lines.

CCP Yokai, the Technical Director over in EVE-land, just posted a dev blog about their new rack setup. This is pretty rare insight for any operation, so it’s definitely worth reading. You don’t get the nitty-gritty details but you get a good overview.

In 2007, the AVEA project proposal called for a new research effort into "so-called virtual property, artificially scarce digital objects that have rapidly become a viable business model for software products and online services." Gold farmers and real-money traders in massively-multiplayer online games had recently broken into popular consciousness. There was an expectation that virtual economies were going to continue to expand in one way or the other. Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT and the Finnish interactive media industry had already had a good start in grasping the phenomenon thanks to some successful early ventures and research projects. Now was a time to push on and take part in creating the next wave of the phenomenon.

This post will share the first of what we expect to be a dozen or more papers on virtual world behaviors. As the first, it's the broadest, but I suspect will be of interest and use to the wider virtual world community. You can find the full text of this first paper here, at the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, with no access restrictions.

Virtual Economy Research Network (VERN) is a communication hub for scholars, students and developers interested in virtual goods, currencies and economies. It was launched in September 2006 and is maintained by Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.

VERN's purpose is to promote academic research in the area, serve as a research resource, and enhance communication between scholars and developers. The main features of the site are a blog, a discussion forum, a bibliography and a list of research links.

The Laws of Online World Design - These are taken from both experience and from the writings of others. Most are the sort of "Duh" things that many who have done this sort of game design take for granted, but others may be less intuitive. Many of the laws here were actually stated as such by others, and not by me.

The world is full of games companies that blow stupid amounts of money on making online games (typically “massively multiplayer online games” (MMO)). It’s time to put a stop to this madness; honestly, I thought everyone learnt their lesson about 5 years ago when we had the last wave of “everyone’s making an MMO … oh god, these things are TEN TIMES as expensive and ONE HUNDRED TIMES as difficult as we thought … Run away!”. Apparently not.

Damion Schubert, lead combat designer for BioWare Austin, argues that your endgame – what happens when MMO players have finished all the lower level quests and “made it” in the game universe – realizes the true potential of MMOs.

MMOGCHART.COM is dedicated to my research in tracking the growth of subscription-based Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). The menu on the left is updated each version with new figures, charts, graphs, and my analysis. My work is wholly independent and free; if you find it useful please consider making a donation via PayPal. If you have any questions, desire an interview, wish to provide numbers, or would like to hire me to consult on a MMOG project, please feel free to contact me.

I surveyed MMORPG players for the first time in the Fall of 99. Since then, I've surveyed over 35,000 MMORPG players from most of the popular US MMORPGs. Over the past 5 years, I've presented these findings in a variety of formats. I settled on The Daedalus Project as a way to easily present findings, but the problem that emerged was that it became hard to illustrate themes and show the big picture using a blog format. The Daedalus Gateway is an attempt to provide a coherent gateway to all those findings.

Damion Schubert has been working with making and designing online games for over 10 years. Damion started working with text MUDs, where he did significant work for CarnageMUD, a game considered by industry experts to be very important in the future development of MUDdom. There, Damion met Raph Koster, who helped Damion get into the pay-for industry years later.

Brandon Reinhart, Lead Designer, has worked in games development since 1998. At Epic Games he developed gameplay for Unreal and Unreal Tournament as well as many Unreal engine features. At 3D Realms he served as a core gameplay programmer on Duke Nukem Forever. At Sony Online Entertainment he switched from programming to game design and became a technical systems designer on Star Wars Galaxies and the Jump to Lightspeed expansion. As the Lead Designer at Spacetime Studios, Brandon develops game IP, helps set the teams game design philosophy, and leads the day to day efforts of the design team in content and gameplay systems.

My name’s Scott Jennings. I work as a designer in the computer gaming industry, and comment a lot here on my blog-type thing on massively multiplayer games. Currently I’m at a small startup called John Galt Games, working on getting Webwars: Eve out the door.