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Role Playing (Games)

New Issue Of The Daedalus Project 34

Posted by Zonk from the learning-through-play dept.
Nick Yee writes "The Daedalus Project have new findings and a news survey. The Daedalus Project is an ongoing online survey study of MMORPG players that started 5 years ago and has surveyed over 35,000 players. Some highlights of this issue's findings: While the media likes to talk about how "virtual" relationships in MMOs are, about 80% of players actually play with someone they know in real life (a romantic partner, a family member, or a friend). PvP servers attract younger players as well as more men than PvE servers. This has implications for gender-bending rates. On PvP servers, female avatars are much more likely to be played by men. 22% of respondents said that they had purchased virtual gold. On average, these players have spent $135 USD on virtual gold. While older players are more likely to have done so, there were no gender differences."
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New Issue Of The Daedalus Project More

New Issue Of The Daedalus Project

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  • Impersonal Game Masters (Score:5, Interesting)

    by QuantumG ( 50515 ) <qg@biodome.org> on Monday October 24, 2005 @08:23PM (#13867991) Homepage Journal
    I was thinking the other day, one of the basic things that is missing from a MMORPG that you get with a tabletop RPG is personal touch of a dedicated Game Master. I can remember playing MUDs where I actually had the freedom to change the world because a GM was there to review what I had done and keep things "in check". This is taken to the obvious extreme with tabletop RPGs where you can do anything after negotiating with the GM. Of course, in a MMORPG there's just way too many other players for you to have a relationship with a GM. In fact, it's almost always company policy that GMs remain out of the game, otherwise everyone will want access to them. Personally, I think that's the wrong way to go. Instead of hiding the GMs the company should be offering their interaction for a fee. To really do this well the development team needs to supply the GM with simple but powerful scripting tools. I'd imagine a conversation might go something like this:

    Player: My enchantment resistance is low and I keep losing rolls against Paladins, what can I do?
    GM: Well, you could go see the Enchantrist, she can probably supply you with some boots that will boost your enchantment resistance.
    Player: Where's the Enchantrist?
    GM: Heh! I can't tell you that. But if you ask at the bar in town you're bound to find someone who can.
    Player: alright then!

    The player then runs off in the direction of town. Meanwhile the GM starts writing a script for one of the bar characters which responds to the keyword 'Enchantrist'. If he gets writers block halfway through writing the list of challenges the player is going to have to face to meet the Enchantrist he can always send some ghouls to intercept the player and delay his arrival at the bar.

    Eventually the player gets to the bar and asks around for the Enchantrist. The character planted there by the GM gives the player the instructions and the player sets off on his quest. The quest may have been a pre-existing one or the GM may have coded it up just now. With a library of sufficient content and a simple scripting language, it should be easy for a GM to give the illusion of an exciting dynamic world.

    • Although that sounds like a great idea...doesn't that just create an insurmountable amount of work for GM's...in the end wouldn't it just be easier for the GM to either tell the player to "bugger off" or tell them where to go?
      • If the customer is paying $25/hr for a personal GM, who cares!
        • They'd have to be paying that much.
          What people don't understand is that GMing is a labor of love. You can pay someone to GM a game, but you have to take into account all the time spent writing the campaign. Even at minimum wage, that's a good 50-80 dollars for a decent one-shot adventure.

          Do you realize how much skill it takes to actually GM? More than most people think.
          Then you have to remember that you're talking about hundreds of Game Masters interfering with each other.
          Writing up dungeons on the
    • That might work fine for a M.U.D. with 250 players, but EQ has ~450,000. Thats a lot of GMs.

      • And how many of those players want to pay $25/hr for a GM? Frankly, if you can make that kind of money off a player you can afford to set up a few thousand terminals in India and train that many GMs.
        • you can afford to set up a few thousand terminals in India

          Is it just me, or does that Enchantrix have a bit of an accent?

          • You must be living in some different universe to the rest of us where MMORPGs actually include speech.
            • As I was saying, EQ2 already has voice-acting for every single NPC. So it's not like a different universe is even needed. It exists in this one already.

              Additionally, if you want to make a character interact with a GM-controlled NPC, voice-chat might be the easiest way out anyway. A GM taking over the "Enchantrix" NPC and role-playing that interaction by voice-chat might just be a lot less effort than requiring the GMs to be competent enough to script a new NPC and a dialog tree, and be confident enough that
              • It would certainly be interesting, but I think we're getting away from current games pretty quickly. In any case, you're gunna need some cool voice modification software so every NPC your GM is puppetting doesn't sound alike. In which case your argument about accents is kinda mute.
                • The argument about accents wasn't mine. I'm just saying that MMOs where the NPCs "talk" already exist. Nothing more.

                  About the accents, personally I don't mind outlandish accents in a game. They can add a certain flavour if they're consistent.
        • "And how many of those players want to pay $25/hr for a GM? Frankly, if you can make that kind of money off a player you can afford to set up a few thousand terminals in India and train that many GMs."

          1. So basically, you're proposing... what? That anyone who can pay $25 can officially get not just an advantage in the game, but they get someone to customize and tailor it especially for them.

          You know what? No, thanks. It's bad enough to have people with rare super-powerful items bought on eBay. Having the ga
          • Yeah, you monitor and review GMs actions and fire the ones that do a shit job. Besides which, who said anything about the GM having the ability to create new items? They could simply be supplying information to the user or selecting objects from a preapproved library and adding them to the world. Of course, then you could say that any interaction between a player and a GM is cheating as the GM (by definition) has intimate knowledge of the game. Great, yes, that's possible, but frankly, you've gotta bala
            • So now you have to pay for not only the GM, but also people who review the GMs. And thats hardly a sure bet against a GM doing something stupid and messing up game balance. And is $25 a month really enough to pay for it? Maybe if you outsource it, but that brings in language and quality control issues. Its definately not practical if you're hiring Americans. As much as people would like dynamic personalized worlds, in truly massive online rpgs, its a bit impractical.
      • Just get gamers to do it for free. The Daedalus poll says the average player plays something like 20 hours a week. Some of them would love to do it.
        • Shya. Maybe as an "elder game" but frankly, as a player I want someone I am paying to be my GM.. that way they are doing their job and I don't have to worry about their entertainment as well as mine.
    • Doesn't scale, issues with quality control, your GMs are hourly employees who are not competent to make design decisions like "How powerful should a Sword of Foozle Slaying be for a level 12 Paladin?"

      The secret to creating new, exciting content in MMORPGs is to develop systems and practices that either generate content algorithmically or cause people to generate it themselves. One obvious and well-worn path is PVP. Another is giving people guild mechanisms. A third is something like Puzzle Pirates port

    • Neverwinter Nights had a fully featured GM system. You could posess NPCs, trigger events, script, even drag a dynamic difficulty slider if the PCs were getting their asses handed to them in a particular fight or were finding it too easy.

      And yet, as both a programmer and an on/off DM for fifteen years, it was still damn hard to keep things running.

      When an RPG is all in your head, you've got millions of years of evolution helping you respond immediately. The idiots decide to open the door marked "Instant Deat
    • I played games like this, and I also played more mainstream MMORPGs where GMs had a much greater control over game events.

      The problem in every single one of them came down to GM corruption. In one game, GMs would kill off unpopular players. Out killing spiders, eh? BOOM, level 500 dragon tha normally only appears as part of special events hits you for n+1 damage and you die and gain a status effect that prevents you from reviving until you cure it, and you can't cure it because your dead and can't do anythi
  • ...to send a ship to Atlantis?
    • Actually I thought it was more to ensure the security of Earth. The Daedalus being the second ship in the X-303 project. They sent it to Atlantis because of the Wraith attack and because the nifty Asgard tech gave them a chance against the Wraith fleet...the Atlantis expeditition is very important to the security of Earth, because of the advanced Ancient tech there. I don't think they built the ship with the intent to send it to Atlantis...they made the decision to defend Atlantis when they heard of the
  • On PvP servers, female avatars are much more likely to be played by men.

    Wait a minute... there are female characters *not* played by men on those servers?

    My entire worldview has shattered...
  • > On PvP servers, female avatars are much more likely to be played by men.

    Of course: most FBI agents are males.

  • Thoughts on PvP (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xgamer04 ( 248962 ) <xgamer04@NosPam.yahoo.com> on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @12:43AM (#13869332)
    I think that people who join RPGish MMOs for the PvP (or stay for it) don't really want to play the game. The ones I know IRL are castoffs from other genres (mainly FPSers weaned on Halo, The Abominable) and now play WoW or whatever because they can get a game anytime, and it's fresh blood, not just their network of friends in real life. They don't care about roleplaying, just being as powerful as possible (and yes, they're all guys). They also don't ever play non-aggro classes. Buut, I've never played a "real" MMO (subscription based, persistent, etc. (I play GW)) so I can't really say whether I'd be down for PvP (I'm somewhat the dying breed of hardcore consoler, raised on the NES).

    • Well, there's a difference (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @02:24AM (#13869707) Journal
      Not all games are GW or even WoW in that aspect. There are games that were launched completely without PvP.

      E.g., PSO was the most extreme case. It wasn't just that you couldn't attack another player, it's that you just couldn't do _anything_ to them. You couldn't leave aggressive NPCs to someone, you couldn't block their retreat, etc. Heck, you couldn't even kill-steal. So people who wanted to play it like a FPS deathmatch just soon left.

      That however also contains the "problem". It's entirely too easy for a publisher to see it as "whaa? you mean we're losing players for lack of PvP? well, then let's add PvP to the game!" And from there the balance that was finely tuned for PvE goes down the drain, as the boards get swamped with "my <insert support class> should deal as much direct damage as the mages and take as much damage as the tanks in a duel" whine. Powers and classes which were useful in more subtle ways than 1-on-1 damage, e.g., even AOE attacks or aggro-management, get proclaimed useless because they're not an alpha-strike in 1-on-1 PvP.

  • Currency traders, PvP etc (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25, 2005 @06:35AM (#13870379)
    That's a worryingly high proportion of players who've engaged in real-world currency trading, particularly as there's no doubt a further margin of people who have also done this trading, but won't admit to it. I play FFXI myself and I'm fairly sure that a few of the people I know in-game have bought gil before, but it is, of course, nigh-on impossible to prove (unless they do something really stupid, like being broke one day and buying a peacock charm, kraken club and scorpion harness +1 on the Auction House the next - and I only know of one person who was dumb enough to do something like that).

    To be honest, I'd have thought it would be pretty easy to identify and close down the accounts used for real world currency trade. The game always tells you who has sent you currency, unless it's via an auction-house purchase. Reading IGE's (the largest currency trading site) website, it sounds like they just send gil directly to the recipient. All the GMs would need to do would be make a few purchases (spending maybe a couple of hundred dollars total) and close down the accounts that the gil came from. Rinse and repeat a few times and you'd have made the whole business deeply unprofitable. I'm almost tempted to take matters into my own hand, make a few minimum purchases from IGE, get screenshots of the gil in my delivery box and report the senders to the GMs. Sadly, I've a sneaking suspicion that all this would achieve would be to get my own account suspended. So I won't.

    On the topic of PvP, I think the article is right in broad terms about the demographic involved, but perhaps goes a little too far and risks being a bit unfair in the stereotype it builds up. It's true that in the days before FFXI had any PvP at all, the vast majority of the players who were demanding it were immature 14 year olds who wanted to get revenge on somebody who'd annoyed them a week before. Once limited PvP appeared, in the form of ballista, and people realised that PvP works both ways and that immature grief-kiddies tend to have far smaller social networks to call on for backup than the more rounded players, most of the clamour vanished overnight. Ballista these days tends to be played by people who are pretty dedicated and specialised. It's not my thing and I doubt I'll ever be any good at it, but kudos to those who are.

    I've played World of Warcraft and while I think it's vastly inferior to FFXI in most respects, I do like the way it's managed to integrate PvP into the game-world without turning it over to the griefers. Having the two major game factions in a de facto state of war, with their own towns and territory, is great for encouraging people to blend the social/organisational challenges of traditional PvE combat with the more tightly defined skillset of PvP. I think that's definitely the model that future MMORPGs (hopefully ones with a bit more depth and challenge than WoW) should be looking to imitate and build upon.

    Finally, on the gender issue. I always assume that any character in game is played by a male, no matter the gender of the avatar or anything they say in game, unless I have met them in real life. I do know a couple of women in real life who play the game - they both use male player characters, simply because while the hassling that female pcs get in-game from male teenagers is flattering (and occasionally profitable) at first, it gets old real fast.
    • I was also suprised by the percent of players who have bought online gold/gil. Almost a quarter of the players? Wow. I have been playing WoW since December and I just received my epic mount (this is a faster one than the normal). It's not easy to get due to its price being so high. I worked my butt off to earn enough money to buy it and I must say it was worth it. It's very disappointing to me that so many people have probably bought their epic mounts from places like IGN (by bought, I mean got the gol

    • Not that easy (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Moraelin ( 679338 )
      "On the topic of PvP, I think the article is right in broad terms about the demographic involved, but perhaps goes a little too far and risks being a bit unfair in the stereotype it builds up. It's true that in the days before FFXI had any PvP at all, the vast majority of the players who were demanding it were immature 14 year olds who wanted to get revenge on somebody who'd annoyed them a week before. Once limited PvP appeared, in the form of ballista, and people realised that PvP works both ways and that

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