Ian-

The thing with combat is, if you don’t get it right no one plays your game. And if there isn’t a ladder, people frequently quit when they get to the top of whatever ladder there is. Once the rewards stop flowing, they stop playing.

And who’s to say that the non-combat aspects of the game are any more fulfilling than the combat aspects of the game? (Community, I know, but that can be transferred). The non-combat aspects can be mined out as certainly as the combat / levelling aspects can be mined out, and it’s tougher to tack a ladder on to keep rewarding people even after they’ve gotten all the fun there is to be had out of whatever core mechanic you present.

If there’s nothing there, no matter how interesting combat is, and no matter how palatable the grind can be made, the game will still leave us empty.

While clearly I agree with the idea that there should be non-combat content, I suggest that City of Heroes shows that it is possible to have a popular MMO without any interesting out-of-combat content to speak of.

One thing I can do in real life is draw/paint, and I’d certainly submit original artwork for in-game play money. I think I could probably make quite a bit of play money for selling paintings – enough to keep my avatar fed and to buy my musical instruments anyway. So in the best of all MMORPGs there would be scope for using one’s real life talents and for playing roles for which one is not suited in real life.

Well while we’re on this subject about tools in/out of game. One thing I was always curious about, specifically r/t SWG.

In SWG I did a considerable amount of Architect crafting, which I thought was wonderfully implimented. Now I like so many others always enjoyed the variation that could be had in furnishings. Specifically the paintings.
One thing I always thought would have been a decent game related type of content would have been to let players actually “paint” (out/in game using tools) (SWG related) these paintings import them into the game, submit them to the Bestine Curator, and allow for a “vote” on them somehow. A percentage of the sales for the schematic/painting from the curator could go to the origional artist account…..much like what PotBS is doing with thier ship flags and etc.

Yeah. I agree.

However I think that the tools that you create for “wish fulfillment” are going to be different than those you create specifically for art creation. For the former I think there is *some* room in MMORPG’s but for the latter I think we’ll see that MySpace/Blogs/iTunes/Pandora/etc. are going to be the types of technologies that best fulfill the needs of the audience. The more effort you put into creating complex/powerful tools for creation, the more the MMORPG framework will be limiting to your audience and the more likely they will be to skip out and just use their own tools and post the results on MySpace.

As I alluded in a prior comment on player-created content I think you need to look at the goal of the player-content and consider what outlets are best for presenting it. It’s not just a matter of “can we add player content X” to an MMORPG. It is really a matter of whether MMORPG’s are a good place for that content or whether there are other mediums for that sort of creation that will be more successful.

Personally I think that people creating and sharing music or art on the internet is fantastic. I just think that that people will tend to find it more rewarding to do this on MySpace and blogs (and further iterations of those technologies) rather than in MMORPG-style worlds. On MySpace you can use all of the tools you are comfortable with for making music, record the song you want, and then let people listen to it and/or share it on their own page (that could mean going to a studio with your band or just playing with music software). I think this is closer to how most people want to create and share music. Using gated approximations of music-creation tools in an MMORPG has a certain “coolness” factor to it but I don’t think it will be as successful at grabbing artists. In the end it will mostly just be a gimmick. With SWG we saw this as entertainment was more or less a “cool” gimmick and the largest issue with entertainers was an inability to affect the world around them in a meaningful way.

One way to look at is just realizing that an MMORPG with a fleshed out music system is really going to reimplement a lot of music-creation interface and software that is already done elsewhere, better. There are lots of good music creation tools that exist in and of themselves. It’s probably better to just let people use THOSE and then provide them ways to share them and not bother with the worldly trappings.

I think it’s telling that one of the first things anyone does in a new game any more is type “/dance” to see what happens. Consider Guild Wars: Factions, where the “hook” of the Collector’s Edition is not a unique piece of loot or unique skill – It’s the ability to summon a set of spectral backup dancers. What’s it say when one of the most popular features of City of Heroes is the variety of dance animations and boombox music tracks? How about when the game spills over into real-life and my daughter rolls her eyes at me for doing a CoH dance to some funky rock song?

Arts are as big a part of any MMO as the developers are willing to let them be. It’s true that the number of artists in any particular game might be small and quality artists even smaller. It should hardly be surprising, given that real life is much the same. We all know someone who “plays at” a musical instrument or a craft of some kind, but how many do we know that pursue perfection of the skill or attempt to make a living at it?

Regardless of that, the true benefit of the arts in the world (and by analog the virtual world) is that the end product is enjoyed by all of the non-artists. If there’s a problem with arts in MMO’s, it’s not that you’re putting in a huge investment of time and resources for a small community. Claiming that an “arts profession” is a waste of time because there will never be more than a handful of artists is missing the point. That handful of artists can, with their contributions to the game environment, have an impact on everyone else in the game that far exceeds the same efforts put into the ultimately self-serving goals of killing and/or destroying lots of crap in the game.

“Arts” is a fluid concept, also. I’d submit that the top smiths in SWG, the guys who made their reputation by creating the very best of the best and whose game play was the pursuit of perfection moreso than credits; those guys and gals were artists every bit as much as the entertainers who organized the bands and the dance troupes. In any sort of craft, being at the top of the field requires that you have an artisan’s outlook as much or more than a merchant’s outlook.

The point I’m making is that when considering the value of “arts” in a virtual world, you need to consider the equivalent value in the real world. The arts are a huge influence in everyday life, even if we take most of that influence for granted. IMO, the game that recognizes this and provides a viable and flexible means of artistic expression is one that will find itself being considered as the “richest” games around, even if only a small fraction of the playerbase is involved in producing the art in the virtual world.

Personally, economics is not my thing. I’d rather have someone tell me a good permanent trade route that just pays my way rather than spend hours looking for a big money-making scheme. Anyway, I never really got the impression that SWG was really an economics game – the economic model never settled down enough for me to see how any real market economy was there. It just seemed to be driven by what the seller demanded. One day you’d see an item costing 1000 credits and the next day it would cost 3000, then it would dip to 200. This might have been a facet of the limitations of the planetary terminals though. But I never got the economy feeling that EvE gives, for example, where the ecomomy really seems to be driven by supply and demand.

I believe that there’s great scope for getting non-gamers (not just sim city fans) to enjoy MMORPGs if more attention was to be paid to the creation aspects. In sim city type games the sense of actually living in the city you create isn’t there, but in an MMORPG it can be a first person experience. For example, I had never thought of building my own home in a game, and I never liked sim city type games, but when I got SWG one of my big accomplishments in the game was building my house with a view of Jabba’s Palace and furnishing it. Of course, since I was a poor entertainer I couldn’t pay the bills and I lost my house after 6 months (which was one of the big reasons why I quit the game), but it was good while it lasted.

I think if there had been any way to customise artistic stuff in SWG that would have drawn more people in. When I built a slitherhorn the best I could do was to name it. There was no way to import my own textures (or even choose from a few stock textures) or alter the sound to be higher or lower pitch or to be flat or sharp. There was no real sense of accomplishment in crafting instruments – you could use poor quality materials and the instrument would look exactly the same as an instrument made of high quality materials. Even crafters who had a lot of scope were fairly limited – as a master droid engineer I had a limited colour pallette, no ability to import textures and no ability to create any of my own content for the droid.

Another thing that would draw people to the game is simple everyday activities like sitting down. When she’s playing games my wife often says “Dammit! I just want my character to sit down”. Often games just don’t let you sit. SWG let you sit, then warped you 12 feet across the floor so you looked ridiculous, so it was as bad as not letting you sit in the first place. Seemingly inconsequential details like this turn people off. Here’s another thing: I would have liked to read a book or read a newspaper in-game every day to see what was happening online. The game “Omikron” had such a feature and “The Last Express” also had such a newspaper. Speaking of “The Last Express”, I think MMORPG game developers could gain from taking a look at it (it still plays on WindowsXP). This game was a great one for my playstyle, and I think a lot of non-gamers liked it because there was very little fighting, few puzzles (and all fairly simple), and the game’s focus was character interaction and just drinking in the atmosphere. Games don’t need to be about fighting to be attractive. Surely the adventure game genre proves that.

Another thing that I think would be a good addition: a training droid. Again, “Omikron” had such a feature. You could train with an NPC (without the threat of a lost life) before going into real combat. This would draw newbies into the game and make real combat more attractive. In two years of SWG play I never once played PvP because it just seemed a thing for leets to do. A NPC combat trainer could give tips and experience that would level the playing field a bit for new players.

Then there’s gambling and card games – mini games within the MMORPG. This is potentially a huge draw. SWG had gambling, but as in reality you could never win long-term. This was a mistake. Gamers don’t tend to be gamblers. No gamer is going to gamble when loss is virtually guaranteed. The gambling should have been set so you had a better than 50% chance of winning – not enough to make a fortune, but just enough to keep a few players in the casinos making a living wage. Then, why not have card games where players can play one another? Star Wars has a couple of different card games where the rules have been codified. There’s a ‘Pazaak’ card game, and KotOR even had the code to make it work, yet SWG had no way to play cards against even an NPC, let alone another player. If mini games could exist within a MMORPG some people would play the game JUST to play their favourite mini game. Heck, I’d be at the Pazaak tables all day. In SWG we (eventually) had swoop races, but again the leets would make the record for the day, usually there were no NPCs racing so you couldn’t even gain a bit of a feeling of accomplishment by beating NPC racers. So most players would emerge from a race depressed and feeling that the game was empty except for the leet players who turned up as soon as the servers went online and took the record.

This brings me to another point: the need for NPCs who actively participate in gameplay. As I said before, despite the fact that NPCs did wander around the cities a feeling of emptiness permeated the game – no NPCs to race on the swoop tracks; no NPC combat trainers (NPCs handing out missions don’t count); no NPC gamblers in casinos; no NPC entertainers in theatres doing shows; no NPCs fighting a GCW battle, no NPC shootouts in casinos, etc. People wandering around don’t really cut it anymore – there needs to be interaction going on, whether it be with other NPCs or with players. Once a game world is packed with players NPCs aren’t needed as much and they can be removed when necessary, but as a game is getting its audience NPCs are essential to give the feeling of a real working world, they also set the market as it’s developing. For example: the lack of NPC entertainers was always been an annoyance in SWG – if players needed a heal at off-peak times there’s often no live entertainers. An NPC entertainer giving out heals for an exhorbitant price (so that the prices of real live entertainers weren’t undercut) would have at least made heals available in off-peak hours.

All of these things could make MMORPGs so much more fun, and would increase the longevity of the game. These aren’t new ideas – they’ve all appeared in one game or another, but in order to draw people in they must be implemented in full, and not piecemeal or half-way as they were in SWG. If a feature is implemented it must be fully implemented and the urge to tweak it post-release must be resisted. Too often in SWG we got features half-finished and these features gained fans, then, because they were half-finished they had to be tweaked and some players were disappointed with the results. SWG was full of such things. For example, the mission terminals: you never knew from day to day how much they would pay, or whether it was even worth it to lose potential tips to do a terminal mission. At one point we had big-payout missions to other planets, which were great, then these mission types were removed by the devs without adequately examining the consequences (which were dire in this case and – in part – led to the AFK macro problem and the overpopulated cantinas in Theed and Coronet and a lack of entertainers anywhere else). One day mission terminals would be a nice way of making money, the next they were useless. Some things shouldn’t be fiddled with too much post-release.

I think if SWG proved anything it proved that there IS a large market for something besides monster-bashing. When SWG first started there were lots of people dancing and playing in the cantinas (I was one of them). The problem was that these professions were not adequately supported, neither by the combat-orientated players (who often couldn’t even imagine why anyone would like to hang out in a cantina rather than hunt monsters or play PvP), nor by the developers (who seemingly exhibited the same lack of imagination).

Entertaining to heal wounds and for tips will only get a player so far. If there’s no meaningful content (i.e. entertainer quests and theme parks) for those who have reached the top of the entertainer professions, then eventually being a mere servant to the combat professions is going to get boring. At each step of the game’s development I urged the developers to make Jabba’s Palace (which was already a fully-implemented combat-orientated theme park) accessible by enabling entertainers to play music or dance for Jabba and his cronies. This was a relatively simple addition – the devs wouldn’t have needed to build any major buildings or extra NPCs, and iot would have made complete sense in terms of the Star Wars backstory (Jabba loves to be entertained), but this advice (and similar ideas from other players) was ignored. Instead we (eventually) got lesser quests which failed to give entertainers the Star Wars feel that a Jabba’s Palace entertainer quest would have undoubtedly given. The Jabba’s Casino quest was a much harder thing to implement, but it was promised, then it was shelved because, surprise surprise, it was found to be too much work. It often seemed that the developers preferred to spend MORE time and MORE effort building content that didn’t immerse the player in the Star Wars lore, rather than making a simpler change that fit right into that lore.

Now, three years on from when I first suggested it, entertainers still have no access to Jabba’s Palace, other than by shooting animals (many entertainers don’t pursue combat skills), and there is no other meaningful entertainer content. Also, because combat ‘leets’ were spitting blood about having to spend 5 minutes away from combat getting the occasional buff, entertainers have had their links to the combat community effectively removed.

My point, in terms of non-combat play in general, is that unless such play is actively supported by either the devs or other players, it will always ‘seem’ unpopular, no matter how popular the concept actually is. Any idea, even a great one, needs support. Just as a gardener doesn’t plant a rosebush without watering it, pruning it and feeding it, you can’t just implement an innovative new concept and expect it to thrive on its own.

In my opinion, what caused SWG’s problems was not too much attention paid to the arts, but too much attention paid to combat (especially ‘leet’ combat. In my opinion TOO LITTLE attention was paid to entertainers. Entertainment is one of the main pillars of Star Wars. When the first movie came out the cantina was one of the high points of the film because of the diversity it brought to the sci-fi genre. Before Star Wars sci-fi films had one alien or maybe two, but Star Wars gave us a galaxy full of alien species and the cantina brought them all together. When the SWG developers slowly killed the entertainer professions the overall game was doomed. Mark my words: if entertainers disappear altogether from SWG the game as a whole will not last much longer. Without packed cantinas (and a reason to fill them) the game becomes just another PvP game. Without cantinas full of different species it’s not even really a Star Wars game anymore. The cantina is as important to the feel of the game as is a lightsaber or an X-Wing.

The developers killed the entertainer professions primarily by allowing too many cantinas. The creation of player cantinas tended to dilute the already sparse populations in the NPC cantinas, leading to a situation where people couldn’t find an entertainer easily. Then entertainer terminals stopped paying a living wage so many entertainers quit because they were reliant on tips which were never forthcoming. Then the hologrind made cantinas annoying, and increased the combat-orientated players even more dismissive of the entertainer playstyle (which they never understood). This is how non-combat play died in SWG, and it’s leading to the death of the game. The developers have always been looking in the wrong place to solve the issue of players leaving the game. It’s never going to be solved by tweaking the combat system. Combat is not really where the Star Wars ambience comes from. If they continue to fix the wrong parts of the game SWG is doomed.

Any ideas on how the Marvel vs. NCSoft IP case dealing with City of Heroes’ character generation tool might affect this debate?

Details: Marvel sues NCSoft because CoH’s character generation tool could be used to create characters resembling those copyrighted by Marvel comics. I’d heard the suit was struck down, but not much more.

How does that precedent affect things here?

Awesome post Raf. What you are talking about is bringing community into the game and more specifically the game play. Of course there is room for that and I would argue that in an age of myspace, flicker, you tube, etc successful games are going to require that kind of interaction. But it probably isn’t going to happen first in a world like SWG where its franchise is best known for star fighting and light sabers.

Great read, Raph.

I’m sure every (former) SWG-player will enjoy every article you’ll post regarding the designs in that game.

As a former CH, I would LOVE to read about what your goals were for the profession, and also, your thoughts about what the profession eventually became – in the game.

Hmm, I’ve been looking up the legalities of performing music, and now I’m horrified. Seems I’m almost a hardened criminal for humming a tune as I walk down the street… What a lovely world we live in.

Still, on a more objective note, if music performance was limited to in-game interpretation, with no ability to use outside music files, I would think that the author’s rights groups should be fairly willing to either waive copyright issues entirely, or provide a blanket licence at a relatively low fee. Has anyone actually asked them?

“Is it all a waste of time? I don’t know. ”

No Raph, it wasn’t a waste of time. Not at all. The entertainer professions as they were implemented were, for the social gamer, just the most powerful draw in *any* MMO that was doing the rounds. We had so much fun and I’m genuinely saddened to find that it could have been so, so much more.

Is there a place for the arts in MMOs? Most assuredly yes. Is there a willingness and an ability to bring in a system that is more than ‘just’ a limited /dance animation? Well… least said.

Moving away from SW:G as it’s a pretty highly charged topic still and just thinking in generic game terms, a ‘bard’ class who could produce some sort of ingame media, be it a written piece or a recording of some musical performance, would add such depth to the game world.

I think one of the attractions of crafting in MMO’s is being able to leave an object in the world that at least has your name on and maybe reflects your attention to detail (or your willingness to stack em high, sell em cheap), likewise in EQ2 the objects with player names that appear teh first time a named MoB is slain.

Oh aye… just imagine it, a theatre with real performers, a holovid of the performance, a museum of playbills…

Where doI sign up?

Damned be the law!

A brainstorm my friend and I had was toying with ways you could input music using a client for a MUD. We mostly concluded with the agreement that, technically, yeah, it was definitely possible. I never realized it might have copyright problems.

IANAL, so I’m not sure, but wouldn’t something like Second Life’s release of intellectual property to the players mitigate it? Then the player who put it in would be liable, not the company hosting the world?

When I first started playing SWG, I was an Entertainer and, more specifically, a Dancer. A fat, balding, old human male dancer but a dancer never the less. I never made any money – who’d pay to watch the fat bloke dance when there were scantily clad and ultra slim females to flirt with and molest. But that was of little concern because I had fun. Lots of fun.

It’s a shame that copyright issues and legal concerns tied up the musician skills because I know a lot of people who would have loved to have been able to do that. Likewise, a shame that any form of in game “creative writing” content didn’t get implemented (although reading the SWG forums regularly leads me to think that’s probably a blessing in disguise).

I still play SWG and the fat man is still around although these days he doesn’t do so much dancing (he’s old and stiff). But thanks for the many splendid days of dancing and drinking until the sun came up again.