On Rewarding Socialization In MMORPGs 36
Thanks to Skotos.net for their article discussing how social interaction affects gameplay in MMO titles. The piece suggests: "That the majority of MMORPGs, MUDs, and other multiplayer games ultimately support achiever players over socializers, or even killers, I think begins to outline how poorly we understand - and support - true social interactions in today's multiplayer games." It goes on to discuss freeform socialization ("We slap a chatline into a game. Then we spend as much time making it look nice"), competitive socialization ("the richest form of interaction possible in multiplayer games, yet ironically it's more often been seen as a problem than as a potential virtue"), and co-operative socialization ("One of the few games that has really tried to push this envelope is Asheron's Call with its ideas for feudal structures.")
Re:tsarkon reports 9 step greased yoda doll (Score:1, Offtopic)
A funny observation, but in reality perhaps, and perhaps not. The Bayesian filter works on an accumulation of tokens; a brief quote, or even several as in my comment, will not necessarily rise to the spam threshold (which threshold of course, can be arbitrarily set).
When I first installed a Bayesian filter for my email, I tested it by sending it spam-like email (containing words like "mortgage", "lolitas", "penis
Re:tsarkon reports 9 step greased yoda doll (Score:3, Funny)
Great, I'm famous. =)
Of Course Social Interaction Isn't Well Supported (Score:1, Troll)
Therefore they have no social skills anyway. Most people play games to get AWAY from life and INTO a world where they can use their strengths and avoid their weaknesses.
So why spend time working on a feature that most of the players have little skill in using anyway?
Sure, someone's going to say how much geeks use text messaging. I'm sure they do. It's a nice way to communicate without having to learn social skills and to avoid REAL intera
Re:Of Course Social Interaction Isn't Well Support (Score:3, Insightful)
Precisely. If MMORG players want social interaction, there's a great simulation of it available 24/7 in the big room with the really high blue ceiling. No modem required.
MMORGs meet other needs.
Re:Of Course Social Interaction Isn't Well Support (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Of Course Social Interaction Isn't Well Support (Score:3, Insightful)
Aside from the "feature" of having brave players trying it out and learning to be social as a side effect, what about the few hundred million other people out there? You know, the kind of people who aren't the loner geek sterotype, and might be interested in a game where they can use their social skills as a "strength"? Might be a large target market out there somewhere, but you won't know until you either d
This would be a perfectly good argument... (Score:2)
By definition anyone who has an interest in multiplayer games has *some* interest in socialization. Otherwise they would be completely satisfied by off-line gaming.
The problem is that no one (even the non-geeks called "social scientists") has come up with a really good model for socialization. Perhaps this is acerbated by the fact that many games are designed by geeks who may be constitutiona
The competition needs to be more organized (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Clearer rules, tougher refs. We've all complained when people get away with cheating. I believe that every game needs to be monstrously despotic in tone when it comes to the rules of its game. However, to facilitate this people need to be clear on what is an infraction, and what isn't one. Too often I see a tactic labelled an exploit, and players penalized for limits in the game engine, especially AI. (No, I don't perch or anything like it.)
2) Announced victors, new seasons, culminating events. People don't simply play baseball forever: there's a set season, and at the end of the playoffs a victor is determined and people move forward. Imagine DAoC where every year from November to the new year the top 3 realms (or best of each realm) were allowed to transfer their characters to a new server where they competed for the championship. (Determined by keep-taking, kill ratio, and so on.)
Why focus on competition? Because that's the essence of any game. I think most games tend to lack a robust competitive environment; once that exists, I feel the support elements (crafting, etc) will take on added importance in the grand scheme. But again, for that to happen, the competative environment must be honed.
-Jeff
P.S. Sorry for the rambling nature of this. Late night, early morning, the usual...
Dark and Light (Score:3, Interesting)
The game is in early beta and has some other really cool concepts. Go check it out, the screenshots are awesome and the community [darknlight.net] so far is friendly and helpful.
MMORPGs like this already exist, besides AC. (Score:2)
Besides if I really wanted to just chat I would load up IRC, or call up real life friends, or even see if any of thoses avatar chatting systems of years ago is still around.
A Tale in the Desert (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been playing the game for a few weeks now (since a slashdot story mentioned it
For Tale, it doesn't stop there. Once you are in Egypt, you realize the game is massive and complex. You simply can't build everything you need to advance your skills in the game without trading resources with others. The best way to do this is join a guild (or guilds, it allows multiple). Guilds in Tale are a social structure. Most likely you will join the guild that your mentor belongs to, and it will be your primary. Once you explore the world for a while, you find other people who want you to join their guild and might have resources not available to you in your current location.
I would almost say it's enforced socialization, but it doesn't feel that way when you play. Achievement is so much *easier* with socilization.
Milcis has this (Score:5, Interesting)
You may say this is open grounds for cheaters. This is, and this is why we had to think a lot about the way the player can use it and cheat. The Slashdot moderation system is obviously a good example of a quite good rewarding system.
Any player can gain triplette either by achieving quests, or by recieving points by other players. It is a pyramidal system that should hopefully balance itself. I won't dive too deep into the rules unless someone is really interested though
Then the interesting thing is the usage of the triplette. It is needed to improve one's magical abilities.
So in Milcis, players can still play hack'n slash, get a huge strength and be the big barbarian we all know (actually, the permadeath makes it harder for PK, but it's not the point here). On the other hand, social players are rewarded with magic abilities (offensive or defensive depending on the magic).
I just wanted to show that, whereas this is not necessarily new to MUD players, there are some MMORPGs (even amateur ones) taking this path of rewarding social behavior and tiding it to the very core of the gameplay and the background. I hope professional developpers will ultimately try this idea too, since it seems like a major requirement to prevent MMORPGs from encouraging hack'n slashers and dumb power-leveling.
Re:Milcis has this (Score:1)
Some potential pitfalls that I can think of off the top of my head (which means you probably have already as well, but hey..)
Discovery and Invention, unless they're very carefully handled, strike me as a great way to either penalize late joining characters or artifically advance their power curve.
Once a lot of things have been discovered or invented already, it will either be more difficult for new players to come up with truly new discoveries or inventions, or if they don't actually n
There's always the freebies: (Score:1)
The original Asheron's Call also had a "patronage" system, which basically was a higherarchical pyramid that allowed you to gain experience for those that you helped teach. It was interesting, but kind o
Socialization. In a MMORPG? (Score:2)
Accountability (Score:3, Interesting)
I have found that the biggest problem for any MMOG, let along MMORPGs, has been that accounts can get banned, but people don't. There's nothing to keep 'Joe Obnoxious' from getting back on. And since sometimes these people have more money than social skills, they'll buy another copy just to get another valid CD-key to get on and start annoying people again.
As a member of the RPGA, I've been impressed that we have formalised procedures to ban people. Ok, you have to pretty much assault someone to get banned (and some of these guys are HUGE, so assault would be scary), but at least we deal with real people.
What I would love to see is some 3rd-party system that verifies identity. Maybe you can gain points that lead towards beta-testing, prizes, etc. by being a good player over time. You'd have this ID account, and then you could have multiple gaming accounts attached. Say you play about 20 different games. Well one community may hate and ban you, but you'd have to really ruin it all over the place to get permanently banned.
Random Sunday morning rambling, but I know this is the kind of thing that would enable my parents to be online gamers and maybe even pay a subscription for games. From my management experience, this could seriously grow the market.
Social ~= Casual; and Casual Hardcore (Score:3, Insightful)
as such, the return on time spent refining your social tools and rewards is going to peak fairly quickly. compare that to the return on time spent polishing your gameplay (adding special abilities, races, classes, etc) or adding game content (monsters, zones, items). You'd probably get more lipservice in the press for a partical system that took 2 months of dev time, than a social structure that took 8.
for most markets, guild structuring/warring and chat groups is about all the structure the playerbase cares for. EQ doesn't even have guild warring and it continues to set the target for massmog size. Sims Online, UO and AC have the best social tools in the mainstream market, and they're all languishing in relative population counts.
And while they have healthy communities of players, no suit is going to bankroll a massmog if your estimates put the player base at 30-100k after 12 months. they all expect 3-500k.
Social players are more likely casual players. and casual players just aren't paying monthly yet. (and who can blame them. $50 for the box and then $15/mo for a game you get to play for 20hrs/mo max?)
it would take an entirely different game, designed from the ground-up, to sell the casual market, and thereby necessitate better social tools.
imo, the price hook for casual gamers is going to be on the level of pre-paid phone cards. Let them pay hourly, pre-pay at a lower rate for bulk hours, or simply pay a flat monthly fee for unlimited.
Why socialization should be supported (Score:1)
You know, Chris Crawford wrote an article about the state of the game industry. In short, he said that the industry was run by 13 year old prepubescent boys with no social skills whatsoever. Of course, I'm paraphrasing (not by much). It's true