Encouraging Co-Operation In MMO Titles?

Thanks to Skotos.net for their article discussing ways players can co-operate positively in massively multiplayer games. The piece starts by talking about socializers, those "...players who are there because they want to interact not just with the game system, but also with other people", and then specifically discusses those who "...try and develop their own hierarchy by latching onto something within your gameworld to use as a token of control" (such as using friend/enemy markings in The Sims Online?) The article concludes by talking about whether MMOs encourage out-of-the-box socializing not designed by the creators: "Is your system robust enough to allow players to freeform Spin the Bottle? How about Pictionary? How about Charades?"

Cooperation?

[Apreche]

Oh, you mean that thing that is absolutely necessary to do anything good in puzzle pirates. The bigger the ship, the more mateys, the more booty. That's just how it works.

Charades?

[gasaraki]

I think it'll be a long time before we're even close to a MMORPG which allows people to play charades. I'll be damned if I know how you're even meant to do it efficiently with current input devices.

Regardless, I think there's a lot than can be done to make MMORPGs more social/recreational without having to go this far. One thing I think would be great, but is really lacking in MMORPGs, are minigames. Seing able to sit down and play chess, poker, etc. at the local tavern or whatever would just be cool. Of course, games specific to the world would be even better, like a made-up card game (e.g. Tetra Master, Pazaak) or even (admittedly harder to make) things like racing games. Either way it gives people a reason to interact in a way that isn't directly part of the game, and people will undoubtedly use this flexibility creatively by holding tournaments for prizes, even gambling away their belongings. I don't really think you need to go to insane technical lengths to get people to socialize, but rather just give them a reason/excuse to do so.

Not Want to, but sometimes because they Can

[leoaugust]

that ignores the power of freeform interaction. The simple fact is that players are engaging in these interactions because they want to.

Many times the interaction is not because they want to, but it's just because they can.

Some people climb a mountain and then freeze to death there. Why ? Because they don't ask themselves why climb a mountain, they ask themselves why not ?

Another example would be...

[leonbrooks]

...people who write operating systems, databases and office suites just because they can. "I'm writing it so I can use it myself" sounds pretty lame after three years...

The opposite is needed

[FunkSoulBrother]

As someone who played a lot of everquest over the years, I can tell you that there was too much cooperation going on. Light Elves and Dark Elves camping together to get some rare item. It was sickening. You need to encourage people to roleplay within their teams, and approach the game from an in-game perspective.

Re:The opposite is needed

[Imperial Tacohead]

Seriously. Some of us don't want to be genocidal maniacs.

Re:The opposite is needed

[*weasel]

Since there's no race war potential in Everquest, there was no point in having the faction system to begin with. the game was all but intended to be PvE from the beginning.

If you wanted mandatory good/bad teams, that stick together according to the story, try Dark Age of Camelot. of course, there's a -reason- to seperate the good/bad in that game. because the whole point is to fight each other.

in everquest there's simply no point to maintaining verisimilitude. it's player vs environment to the extreme

Re:The opposite is needed

[FunkSoulBrother]

I suppose. The obvious conclusion being that Tallon and Vallon Zek were the superior servers. :-P

Shattered Galaxy

[JorenDahn]

The game Shattered Galaxy [shatteredgalaxy.com] has fantastic cooperation. Although I suppose it should, it's a team game by design. It's an MMORTS (the first ever, despite what the makers of Belerium or whatever it's called think [an MMORTS which isn't even out yet]) where the opposing sides (every player is in one of the factions - at the moment each planet has three factions) engage in a battle somewhere on the world map. Each part of the world map is divided in to provinces, and the provinces where the battle starts becomes the battle field (which brings out a lot of worldmap-scale strategy elements). Each faction is allowed up to 16 people in (there's also a balancing system so that if one team is all very low level people they can let more people in to keep the battles balanced), and they battle not to kill each other, but for control of Points of Contention (called POCs for short). These are captured by standing on them for a certain amount of time (from 30 seconds to a minute depending on how many are on the map - 1 POC on a map means it's at least a minute, so the map isn't too easy), during which of course the enemy will focus all their attention on destroy the people on that POC. So then you have people who need defensive units to try to focus fire on a POC (for instance with heavy artillery or carpet bombing which is otherwise difficult to make effective use of, but is excellent for POC defense), people who try to focus on toughness to withstand the beating necessary to capture the POCs, people to specifically attack the defenders, and people to defend those defenders, and then you have a huge amount of teamwork already. Then there's also considerations over timing strategy (each battle has a limit of around 16 minutes from when it begins, and there's usually a final push at the end, but some strategies play on that expectance and do things differently), where your units enter the battle (there's specific points where any units can enter a map, and which units can enter where is effected by who owns which provinces on the worldmap), and of course general cooperation to have an effective combination of units at the end of the battle when the sparks fly, while trying to match the enemy's strategies. That alone brings out a ton of strategy and cooperation, but then they also have regiments (SG's version of Guilds or Clans) which let people cooperate in larger numbers.

Regiments also have something around them which isn't in other MMOs I've played: politics. Sure, there's a little bit of politics in some others, but here I mean there's tons of politics. Each faction is headed by an Overlord is elected by the populace (every paying character over level 6 has 1 vote [and yes, you can play the game without paying, you just don't get as many options as paying players]), and that Overlord has sole control over the faction's council. The council can have up to 13 members, and each member is a regiment leader. This keeps regiments as something special, unlike all the MMORPGs where there's a million guilds, an some only with a few people who want their own chat channel. The council members also get special powers, like 20% bonus HP, the ability to punish abusive players (punished players get stuck in the capital), and the ability to shout (send a message to everyone in the entire faction, rather than the usual options of a personal message, talking out loud [everyone in the current province can hear], or talking over regiment chat). So they can become quite important for faction-wide announcements, or sometimes faction-wide coordination (which is always fun). Since the Overlord and Council Members have these powers and are so important the elections are a very big deal. You see all the politics you see in real life too. Like promises of taking certain actions, putting certain people on council or taking them off (some people run for OL based largely on publicly promising to disband a particular regiment which is disliked by others), and things get very interesting. And once someone is an

The wrong perspective..

[JavaLord]

Do MMO makers ever think that some players (ie like me) would like to go through a MMO without socializing if we don't want to? I hate forced co-op and socializing, and after playing Star Wars Galaxies it seems this is that is the way MMO's are heading.

In game charades? I'd be happy if one of these games could come up with a fun combat system. Game companies seriously should ditch making the little in-game garbage (ie, SWG's fishing simulation, charades, whatever else) and focus on the core parts of the game (ie, combat, balancing races and skills, the economy, etc).

Re:The wrong perspective..

[Anonymous Coward]

Do MMO makers ever think that some players (ie like me) would like to go through a MMO without socializing if we don't want to? I hate forced co-op and socializing, and after playing Star Wars Galaxies it seems this is that is the way MMO's are heading.

This is a genuine question, not an attempt to make fun of you - if you don't ever want to socialize, why do you play MMORPGs? Isn't the appeal of the game to interact with a massive number of people in a game world?

In game charades? I'd be happy if one o

The root problem with massmogs.

[*weasel]

in short, it's the level system.
more specifically, any character-advancement system that allows one player to become orders of magnitude more powerful than a 'newbie'.

first, it massively imbalances pvp. with a system that gives a player the power to kill a nearly endless stream of players weaker than himself, you simply cannot have player vs player content that appeals to the mass market.

second, it destroys the casual gamer segment. in the level based system, the casual gamer falls behind by definition, and quickly becomes a liability to most groups, not an asset. once the average character level is beyond what the casual gamer can manage, they leave, because there's no-one to play with. they can't earn 'experience' as fast as everyone else, because they don't play as much.

Furthermore, they can't even participate in the player economy. Without as much cash as the 'big boys' have to throw around, no player artisan is going to take his paltry money to make product appropriate for his character level. if they do, they'll undoubtably charge him much more than what the product sold for when the average level characters were at his level. He gets the ugly end of the player economy, just because he has fallen behind, or started late.

On top of that, even socializing is difficult. The lowbie almost certainly cannot safely travel to where the average level characters congregate alone. The game mechanics punish the casual gamer. They cast them out from the player society.

third, the levelling system wastes developer content. In everquest, the conservative estimates are at 80% of the content ever made for the game sitting idle. For all characters outside the appropriate level for any piece of content, there's no challenge, no reward -- so they don't bother (largely by design). Bust as we've already seen, the game casts out players who can't 'keep up'. for the most part, only the content suitable for the average character level matters. A glut of characters will hit a piece of content, pushing up demand for it, and crowding around it. Then they will all leave abruptly, and any changes made to alleviate competition for that content is waste. In fact, that content, overall, becomes waste. Think of all the developer time SOE sank into modelling, texturing, coding and balancing the creatures and zones in Everquest that no-one uses anymore.

Lastly, almost all levelling games have the underlying assumption that players need to be 'high' level to do 'cool stuff', see 'cool things' and fight 'cool mobs'. Newbies fight an endless stream of vermin. Hardcore players fight dragons, explore dungeons, see waterfalls and get cooler looking stuff.
The casual gamer will simply never see most of the 'cool' content. It will be wasted because nothing they experience will encourage them to suffer through the rest of the injustices of the system to try to get to the 'cool' stuff.

Basically, casual gamers simply -aren't-playing-commercial-massmogs-. They aren't there because the game design punishes them. So questions as to why the content isn't there for them is largely moot.

Worse still, the content isn't there for them, because fundamentally, it's hard(er) to make. Game developers know very well how to make bigger meaner monsters with more, shinier treasure. Few of them know how to make an engaging sandbox.

There are other roadblocks for the casual gamer: hardcoded 'groups' with limited slots, design complexity for its own sake, 'downtime', 'time sinks', unclearly conveying game rules, etc.

But they pale in comparison to the problems created by the oldest design short-cut in persistant gaming.

I talk about the casual gamer instead of the socializer directly -- simply because as the socializer does not spend most of their time achieving, they are punished by the system in the same way as casuals.

But making 'open' systems for casual/social gamers, without adressing the traditional systems that keep these same people away, is a waste.

Lost Dungeons of Norrath

[Hecubas]

Anyone who's played LDoN for Everquest should see that expansion really gets to the core of playing cooperatively. It reminds me so much of the old days of D&D, since you are stuck together in ye' old dungeon crawl with your group of three to six players a mission that is timed (90 minutes). You really need to act as a team or you'll be wiped out quick. The cool thing about LDoN is that it rewards each team member with points for successful missions, and later those points can be used to buy some sweet gear. So it's a win-win situation for being a team player.

Everquest is making it happen

[indros13]

My roommate is a five-hour-a-day Everquester who runs a guild of 75-90 people. They meet several times a week for "raids" that involve coordinating nearly the entire membership for an adventure. In my best understanding, some areas of the game are nearly impossible to navigate without such numbers, making the out-of-game guild system an essential development to the success of the individual players.