Peter, that’s why I said you don’t want to make it hard to form strong ties, but you also don’t want to rely on them either. Strong ties cannot be formed in large enough aggregates that you end up with a stable community. They also tend to be much more insular than weak ties. Weak ties can upgrade too of course, which makes them a much better thing to develop in. So while everything you’re saying is indeed quite accurate, it missed my point, which is that you really need to foster the weak ones more than you need to worry about the strong ones. You get a lot of benefits for having institutionalized weak ties, and almost no benefits for attempting to institutionalize strong ones (not to mention that you almost always fail to pull that off well anyway; strong ties are *hard* to force). Weak ties often turn into strong ties too, so there’s no real need to bother trying to cater to that specifically either.

I don’t think we’re doomed Derek… I just think they won’t be nearly as pretty or as big in scope. Scale stuff down to a core that can be built on, get those 200k users so you have some stable income, and start from there. Even if you have to cut half your features, if you can get to the point where you can sell it as a cheap investment, and you can get some active return on it, you can move to adding that stuff back in later. And if you can get your concept to work with something like Metaplace, so much the better. The barrier for entry there is much lower. You have to give up something to get something though. It’s unfortunate. The people most able to take risks are the people least likely to do so.

“In fairness to PotBS, I really did appreciate the dedication and hard work that obviously went into it. There’s a lot of neat things in that game, and I loved the hands-on approach and candor the developers give on their forums. I just don’t see how they could go much further to appease my “carebear” sensibilities without either compromising the game’s vision or alienating their die-hard “phallus versus phallus” enthusiasts.”

First, thanks! And second, check back in around 1.5 and let us know what you think, we should have a much better balance by then.

@Peter

Actually, the *really* strong ties probably aren’t that effective in keeping people around long term. Yes, it may stave off player loss for a while, but when it happens, the entire group goes, not just the individual. I believe Raph has commented on this before: the strongest ties leave the bounds of the game itself; you cannot rely on them. So there’s an inherent problem with that. Weak ties are probably more effective long term since they foster a sense of community, but it’s a community that has replaceable members. Since people can come and go more easily with weaker ties, you don’t get huge drop offs when, say, a guild collapses. You obviously don’t want to make it hard to make strong ties, but you absolutely need to support weak ties if you want to foster a sense of community across the game.

@hanshotfirst
I didn’t take offense – you were a little sarcastic maybe, but I’m good with that. I really love the core of the game, but I’m too much of a carebear at heart to truly enjoy open pvp myself, much as I tried to make it work for me.

The biggest problem I see for PotBS is this: those who truly enjoy the economy, but not the pvp, find themselves the sheep to the ravening wolves. The pvpers who really enjoy pvp, but dislike the economy, either must play the econ anyway, or target the economy players in pvp (because that’s where the money is!). If they enjoy ganking, well, that’s a short term win for them, but a long term loss, as the gankees throw up their hands in disgust and leave. If they’d rather have a fair fight, it’s not even a short-term win.

Now, I know the devs are working hard to balance that — they are adding more cash flow into the equation on the pvp side (so less need to focus on rich targets) and adding reasons for the pve-ers to buy what the pvp-ers produce (marks of victory).

@Russell I love that the increased populations are leading to escort services, and perhaps carrier services will come in as well. I know that when I was really feeling the pain of trying to move even raw materials due to the red circles, I could have asked for an escort. But, populations being what they were, if there were only 3 on in my society, and 10 on in my nation, I hated to ask them to stop building contention to defend a port so I could move goods around.

@Derek

Oh, it’s quite possible to maintain profitability even with a relatively low amount of subs… but you can only really do that if you don’t over spend on the initial dev costs. UO, EQ, and SWG may have returned on their investment, but they also didn’t launch with something like an 80 million dollar start up cost. WoW would not have been all that profitable with 400,000 subs. But even if you keep the budget down, most MMOGs are not instantly profitable either as far as I know. Because of the sub fees, dev costs are recouped over time, not all at once. This is a strength long term, but it also means that if you flub your launch bad enough you may be in a tight spot since you don’t have immediate incoming profits. So it’s hard to get more “indie” companies into the game, since the barrier to entry is so high. Big companies like Big money, and little companies that would be more prone to innovate simply can’t afford to try.

I think there need to be more games out there trying new and different things, willing to accept their niche and not trying to be the next WoW.

Not long ago there was a time when 400,000 subscriptions was king of the hill and made for a profitable game as well unless someone somewhow wants to tell me that EQ/UO/SWG didn’t return their investors money. Many look at the success of WoW and want to be that game only to miss out on a very successful and profitable couple hundred thousand subscription game idea.

HI Loredena,

With the higher density of players, we’re starting to see behaviors we expected to see earlier on. Relating it to your issue, my wife (who plays a Freetrader) wanted to get into a PvP area, and there were groups offering a paid escort service to take her safely into the port. These are things we expected to happen much earlier on, but with the lower density, there weren’t enough customers to keep people incented to do this.

@hanshot “And with all due respect, while attempting to ferry goods to a lucrative port, you were distressed to find your merchant ship(s) attacked on the high seas… in a game about pirates? Really??”

You know, neither of us were that surprised that in a merchant ship we’re going to be popular targets. Here’s what I hate though — it’s not like I’d get jumped by a single person in a similar-leveled ship, where hey, I at least had a shot. No, I’d get jumped by a group of 50s who had ignored that group of 45s (who might at least be an interesting pvp fight) in favor of my ship, and the cargo they can’t actually carry. At least on my server they usually accepted surrenders, but that’s far from a given.

You can’t design interdependent systems in one pass. There’s an iterative design that has to happen before launch. Eolirin is right about ‘worldy’ games tending to be unaccessible to new players and as a server ages, this problem only becomes more intense. That said, there are ways to solve the problems with a ‘worldy’ type game.

I’d start by giving users the ability to belong to more than one group of players. The idea that I can only be a member of a single guild in a game without creating another character is an artificial barrier to emergent game play and at times I think it hampers retention when the group dies and takes all of its members with it.

More so than this, these groups need to be recognized in game and have a purpose. A minimum scaffolding needs to be setup so that there is something there for the players to build upon. Cities need to have meaning that is not derived from other player-dependent systems. Perhaps a player run city can become a starting location on your map for newbies. Maybe a player run city has control over a specific piece of land. Is there governance powers granted to the controlling player-run city? How about being able to belong to a crafting guild, an adventuring guild and part of a larger player run city? I think it is a good goal to encourage the weaker-tie groups to form but you have to facilitate them to some degree in the game in order to formalize the basic ties you need to support interdependent game systems.

Lastly, the veteran experience has to tie into the newbie experience in meaningful ways to ensure that these weak-ties are continually reborn. Weaker ties break more easily so the game needs to incent players to rebuild them. Connect this with the weak-tie group based goals and the whole system should present a feedback loop that helps sustain the ‘worldy’ game. Things like control of land being a function of the population size of your city. Perhaps your crafting guild earns titles based on the number of mentored players. There’s a whole host of ways that one can encourage veterans to interract and the possibilities open up dramatically when groups can have goals within your gameplay.

I could go on an on about how to solve ‘worldy’ game issues and there are always exceptions to every proposed solution, so solve is probably too strong of a word. Facilitate is a better word because when you’re talking about player driven anything, it’s more like herding sheep than it is building a widget. Needless to say complex psychology-based game design is very scary from a risk/reward investment scenario, especially as the $$$ from today’s MMO’s continue to climb.

@Charles Ellis

There are some pretty big problems with starting your design out from that stand point though. Not unsolvable ones, but they’re still very difficult ones. For these sort of worldy systems to work, you need the critical mass that Raph was talking about, and it’s very hard to get that if you’ve got a game that’s not easily accesible and welcoming to newer players. Forcing any sort of interdependce immediately makes a game less appealing to a new user, the stronger the tie being forced, the harder it is for a new player to get into the game. Weak ties might not provide too much of a stumbling block, as long as they’re somewhat asynchronous, but the more direct contact you need with someone, the harder it is to develop the very vital critical mass that you need for the game to even function.

There’s competetion in the market today; someone who gets trapped at a port and can’t get their ship out to do what they want (move goods around) and has only the options of doing something they don’t really want to do (socialize heavily), or leave, is going to leave. Everyone time someone does that, you slip that much closer to having the entire system collapse. You’re struck with a number of server merges, and are left with a very heavily dedicated but small core of players. This isn’t that great a place to be in as you’re then on a downwards spiral to collapse. Depending on the size of your core and the initial investment, you can do okay with what you’ve got, but there’s very little room for growth.

World-like games can be made, but they need to make sure that they provide an inviting, easy to get into beginning point. It’s okay to have high levels of interdependence, but there needs to be some sort of process to ease players into that interdependence. You need to be able to build your numbers up sufficiently that you can even begin to think about turning those numbers into a real community, if you can’t do that, you’re going to spiral downwards. You also need to be very careful in how open ended the community is too; there’s a strong potential for entrenched groups to not be all that welcoming to newer users, especially if there’s no benefit for them to be.

But it’s really hard to talk about some of these things with any sort of real world examples, as every game that’s attempted worldy mechanics has had a host of other problems. SWG’s combat and quest systems left something to be desired and there were server stability issues, EVE’s combat system is about as fun for most people as watching paint dry – it really only shines when you’ve got a large group of players – and it’s got some severe accesibility issues making it hard for newer players to jump in. EVE’s success is mostly in spite of itself, though it does show that people do want something more. UO had… well… better not to go into UO’s problems, but UO was the only one that really forced people to deal with them so it’s hard to use it as any sort of example anyway. We’re not in the same world as when it came out. (And don’t get me wrong, I really loved UO, but it had many, many, many, issues.)

As an aside: SWG’s combat probably would’ve worked if not for armor and stupid huge buffs. It was actually kinda fun early on before everyone discovered that you could end up with enough of a buff from dancers and doctors that you could completely negate any of the penalities for wearing armor and then some. It turned Fort Tusken from being a scary place that a large group would have trouble with into something soloable. It would’ve been nice if we beta testers had ever gotten far enough along the advancement ladders to figure that out so it could be corrected earlier on, but such is life. At least you guys managed to launch with a chat server that worked, I remember how much hell that thing was in Beta 2. (No offense to Raph and the launch team; I just wish we had been able to foresee more of the problems before the game had gotten that established. Early SWG was actually pretty decent, it just broke down after a certain point. By the time we ended up with bots handing out buffs left and right it was pretty much too late)

“but I’m of the opinion that participation in a player-driven economy (particularly the one in PotBS) *is* as much a form of PvP as shooting a cannon.”

Yes, you’re correct. The vast majority of our current systems and those coming down the pike could be interpreted in this way, though players don’t seem to think of it in those terms. From our point of view, what we’re really interested in is player-created content for other players. Typically, this has some sort of competition amongst players, and you could make the argument that it’s PvP. I think using that term, though, clouds the issue for the average user.

But the other system, and the more important one in the devs and many players eyes, was PvP.

Not to sound unsympathetic to your situation, but I’m of the opinion that participation in a player-driven economy (particularly the one in PotBS) *is* as much a form of PvP as shooting a cannon.

And with all due respect, while attempting to ferry goods to a lucrative port, you were distressed to find your merchant ship(s) attacked on the high seas… in a game about pirates? Really??

For Pirates in particular part of the issue is that the two interdependent systems attract players with different goals who don’t always enjoy the other sides world.

For example, my wife really enjoys tradeskills and the economy of these games and was having a blast with the economy in Pirates. I enjoy going out and exploring the world and when I first looked at the game what I really wanted to do was be a trader and move goods from point A to point B. Sadly, there was no real reason to be a trader but early on I still enjoyed hauling my wife’s wares to ports to get the best prices while enjoying the scenery and chatting.

But the other system, and the more important one in the devs and many players eyes, was PvP. As they started making adjustments to increase the amount of PvP available in the world I found it harder and harder to do what I enjoyed. At the same time my wife was finding it harder and harder to sell stuff since it was getting to be all but impossible to move goods from the port they were made in to a port with a larger market without risking losing the entire cargo. It only took a couple of nights of not being able to zone out of the current port without being jumped by groups of people higher level than we were to just make us move on.

I doubt we were the only ones that felt this way or just kind of faded away from the game.

They promote horizontal competition, but vertical cooperation, I think is a more accurate way to think about it.

No offense, but I have no idea what you just said.

I think is entirely a question of whether the service provided is mediated or not. You probably never felt that way about a crafter, since you could interact via the shop UI. You may have over something like a healer, where the experience required direct contact. The crafter is a weaker tie than the healer, which is weaker than a guildmate.

Oh trust me, there were *numerous* crafters (or more to the point, vendors) I never directly interacted with, yet despised *greatly* in SWG. I could cite many anecdotes, but to generalize, there were several who came into large sums of game currency (either via power-gaming or more “questionable” avenues) and would leverage it to effectively create pseudo-monopolies. This was especially troublesome during the height of the “holo-grind” phase, when the resource market became so grossly inflated it was largely inaccessible to a significant portion of the player base. One individual on the Gorath server immediately comes to mind. Not only did he capitalize on this, but was also notorious for misrepresenting items on his vendors.

Still not a huge fan of interdependent systems, particularly “player-driven” economies. Why? ‘Cause at their root, they promote competition more so than cooperation, which in my experience still fosters insular playing… not to mention exuberant drama.

Sure, that might be the very thing that exemplifies “interesting gameplay”, but frankly I could do without it.

Soaking up my precious few moments of free time available to curry favor with some “leet”, power-gamer kiddie or disgruntled stay-at-home diva is not my idea of good fun, especially so if progress hinges upon it. I’d much rather socialize on my terms and with people who’s company I genuinely enjoy.

That’s not to say I’m advocating single-player games or LAN parties. I like to meet new people and make new friends. But by the same token, I don’t enjoy being fodder for up-and-coming megalomaniacs or borderline sociopaths either.

The fact that EVE is set in easy-to-author outer space instead of hard-to-author landscape on some planet has a lot to do with how they can have one giant server with no instancing. Virtually infinite hand-crafted environments aren’t really an option for most settings.

Next time around the biggest thing I intend to do is get rid of “hard” shards so that the players can move more easily from shard to shard without the pain and the question of how much server capacity we need isn’t something that’s nearly as visible to the players.

I knew there was a reason I liked reading you blog. This is another one of those great inspirational post that says “Just keep reaching for all those stars” And oh yeah, it gives you pointers for along the way.
Thanks Raph.