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Role Playing (Games) Businesses Programming IT Technology

IGDA Persistent Worlds White Paper Released 72

Posted by Zonk from the white-papers-inc dept.
Elonka writes "The Online Games SIG of the IGDA has released the latest in a series of White Papers on the online computer gaming industry. The 2004 Persistent Worlds White Paper (80-page, 457K pdf) had several contributors from across the industry, and gives general "developer to developer" advice, covering everything from a quick overview of major products, to design considerations on multiplayer gameplay and dealing with online communities, to technical considerations, to some stats about the international marketplace, including the rapidly-growing Asian market. Editors included Daniel James of Three Rings Design, makers of Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, and Gordon Walton, VP and Executive Producer at Sony Online and presenter of the Ten Reasons You Don't Want to Make a Massively Multiplayer Game talk at the 2003 Game Developers Conference."
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IGDA Persistent Worlds White Paper Released More

IGDA Persistent Worlds White Paper Released

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  • Ability to ignore (Score:3, Informative)

    by teiresias ( 101481 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @10:55AM (#11362224)
    The one feature I have enjoyed the most in any multiplayer game has been the ability to ignore other players. A simple /ignore #playerID and all the n00b, j00 suX, ph33r m3, 1337 bs get's flushed down the toilet.

    That's in the white paper, right?

    RIGHT!

  • WoW (Score:1, Interesting)

    by brianconnolly ( 828461 )
    is WoW not in the report because of how new it is? how would WoW stats affect other MMO's rankings in this report?
    • hmmm as i read more of the report, i see they list WoW as a "recent launch game". disregard my lack of ability to RTFA.
    • On Bruce Sterling Woodcock's site [mmogchart.com] there's a chart [mmogchart.com] showing market share which includes WoW.
      • Assuming that Blizzard's numbers are accurate then those numbers are WAY small for WoW, Blizzard claims 600,000+ signups making it by far the #1 US MMO. Those numbers of from Nov, since WoW didn't ship until Nov 22nd I'm not suprised that there wasn't a stronger showing for Nov.
        • Alas, in the chain of edit-refine-edit we overlooked making last-minute updates to new numbers. We're planning an update in the next couple of months before GDC, which will reflect Blizzard's success.

  • Yeah, okee (Score:5, Funny)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @11:01AM (#11362305) Journal
    Gordon Walton, VP and Executive Producer at Sony Online and presenter of the Ten Reasons You Don't Want to Make a Massively Multiplayer Game

    Reason number 11: There ain't enough room for both of us. You just might take business away from EQ, and we'd have to send an army of IP lawyers to bring you down.
    • Or more like:

      Reason 12 - We know we just rely on a huge marketing budget to make our games profitable. If people were to start coming out with MMORPGs that were actually FUN to play, we'd be screwed.

      • Or, worst of all:

        Some young wiseguy would figure out how to build a distributed MMORPG server, p2p-style. Imagine if there would be no need for massive central servers anymore - people could play for free !

        Hmm... All it really takes is dividing the gameworld into regions, assigning a region to a bunch of machines, and some way of verifying that those machines don't cheat (that everyone follows the same rules). Then just migrate people from machine to machine, and make the area division algorithm so that

        • Wasn't that, at least sort-of, the notion behind QuakeWorld? You'd kind of hop from server to server, basically like a giant ass distributed map?

          It could work.
    • Reason number 11: There ain't enough room for both of us.


      That was reason number 10, not 11.

  • Massively Multiplayer Online Games (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Antonymous Flower ( 848759 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @11:11AM (#11362426) Homepage
    I haven't read any of the links but I feel this is a good place to provide my personal feedback on MMOGs. I am just a player.

    MMOGs are addictive. The psychological gratifications that normally stem from social interactions in meatspace can be obtained through these online games. Similar gratifications can also be acheived in these games. Consider the team who works on a space probe, launches it and is able to explore a new world. Teams in these games band together to overcome challenges and are rewarded mostly only by the accomplishment. This was my favorite part of Everquest and, in my personal opinion, the redeeming factor of these games. Many who ascend to this level of gameplay eventually become distraught, though. It is my observation that these people don't hate the game. Rather, they are no longer challenged and are no longer exposed to this very satisfying "team accomplishment gratification." They all eventually try other games, find themselves unimpressed by the already-been-done game mechanics and discontinue play of the new game. Many game developers realize that there will always be a 'casual' gamer to cater to in order to secure profit. However, if they only cater to these casual masses their game will just be another lump in the pile. If you please these "hardcore" players who want to be challenged you will be rewarded with their loyalty. Your success as a game designer/developer is only limited by your imagination in game mechanics.
  • "In online," Walton claims, "Customer service is the business... If we were an army, customer service would be the infantry."

    "Is there any upside here? NO," Walton grunts. It's simply a necessary (and frustrating) expense.

    Supporting the "customer" should NEVER be a frustrating expense. Supporting your customer, Mr Walton, should be your main concern in EVERY business.

    When are companies going to learn that across the whole market, CUSTOMERS COME FIRST and are not there to be bled dry and fobbed o
    • I agree, and would like to add: Most customer service requests in these massively multiplayer games are "I lost all my stuff and I want it back" or "he stole my thingy." Solutions to these requests are easily hardcoded into the game. Developers should consult with customer service. Customer service is vital and does not have to be frustrating or expensive.

    • Re:Gordon Walton.. Customers come first (Score:4, Informative)

      by grazier ( 118138 ) <grazier.gmail@com> on Friday January 14, 2005 @11:30AM (#11362703)
      Except that:

      "'Is there any upside here? NO,' Walton grunts. It's simply a necessary (and frustrating) expense."

      Is in reference to having to retain lawyers to fight the lawsuits that are filed against the company. It is NOT in reference to customer service.

    • Worse they seem to take the same approach to code quality as well. Most online games I have played have suffered from some horridly simple bugs that would be caught with a real Q&A process to an equally if not worse customer service response.

      Game companies, especially mmorpg style, lose all their credibility when they claim they can track someone duping or exploiting but say they cannot refund you items lost to bugs because they cannot believe you.

      It is a "we don't give a shit - we're gods in our ivo
      • Worse they seem to take the same approach to code quality as well. Most online games I have played have suffered from some horridly simple bugs that would be caught with a real Q&A process...

        And in some cases, the company does not bother to fix the bug when it becomes obvious and the customers complain.
        Example: Neocron, which is otherwise a really cool game, but the continuing lack of QA really hurts.
    • While there is no doubt that lots of problems can occur in these games, and that Customer Service tends to lack in its quality in most if not all of them - particularly on response times for instance, its also true that the players of many of these games seem to have unreal expectations concerning them.

      These are the most complex computer games currently being devised. Balancing all the issues and features involved to try to produce something that feels fair to all players has got to rank up there with some

      • The games need to punish anti-social behaviour in the same manner that society does I think, and its going to take a while to develop models that let that happen. Most people are not into open PvP, or permanent death for characters although those features would resolve many problems if combined in a game :)

        Let people donate a part of their in-game money to a bounty against the offending player. The bounty gets big enough, a bounty hunter goes after the creep. To prevent abuses, whenever you donate to a

        • The issue with a bounty system is it's exploitable.

          Joe Griefer griefs Newbie Dude. Newbie Dude puts bounty on Joe Griefer. Bill Cohort is a friend of Joe Griefer. Joe Griefer flies a newbie ship, drops all his equipment or just picks a generally convenient time to die and lets Bill Cohort kill him. Bill Cohort and Joe Griefer split the bounty.

          There are certain situations which eliminate this problem, but it is not a very flexible system and thus not widely applicable.

          ~Lake

    • Re:Gordon Walton.. Customers come first (Score:4, Informative)

      by drew ( 2081 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @12:34PM (#11363775) Homepage
      this might be insightful except for the fact that he took quotes from two separate reasons and put them next to each other. He does go on to say after the first quote that supporting the customer is essential to success with a subscription based model.

      then he goes on to the next reason, which is that you need to retain a lot of good lawyers to run a mmog. it discusses lawsuits in small claims courts from players regarding hacking, cheating, etc. as well as the commonly disputed issue of who owns all of the virtual stuff. in the game.

      in short, retaining lawyers is a necessary (and frustrating) expense, not supporting the customer...
    • Taking two lines out of context doesn't help make your point, it makes you dishonest.

      Walton says that customer service is the MOST important thing you can do.

      Later, he says that the is no upside to HIRING LAWYERS to defend yourself from frivolous lawsuits, something that I challenge anyone to deny.

      If you win, you've 'bullied your customers', you lose, well, "you lose". Either way, you're paying the lawyers.

      Again, he doesn't say that there is no upside to customer service.

      • I was taking both statements within context of the article, thanks..

        What he's basically saying is this: "Customer support is essential with on line gaming because we can't get away with fobbing them off (like you can in other sectors of industry who don't talk to each other). So don't you bother doing it either because its far too expensive for the likes of you".

        Both statements of which I find objectionable, and what my post was about.

        He's moaning about the cost of providing support!! Whether or not law
    • WTF? Those are from two different items on the list!

      "Is there any upside here? NO," Walton grunts. It's simply a necessary (and frustrating) expense. refers to keeping a team of LAWYERS, not customer service!

  • Argh (Score:3, Interesting)

    by daeg ( 828071 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @11:25AM (#11362608)
    I am bloody sick of the MMOGs as of late. I want some decent single player games that don't suck. I have enough FPS games to last until the draft of WWIII, where are the cool RPGs and innovative games?

    I would consider playing an MMOG if it had a "single-ish" mode. I don't want to be disturbed by others, 90% of them are children anyway. Unfortuantely, they are necessary to support MMOGs as the primary clientelle.

    Skimming that paper made me dislike MMOGs even more. Bravo, if that was the intent.

    • Re:Argh (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tarnin ( 639523 )
      What? You do know the MM in MMORPG is Massivly Multiplayer right? You don't want to be disturbed by others? Why are you even playing an MMO in the first place? You should be playing single player games period. Games like this are not for you and your comments on this subject are moot at the least.

      These games are created for people who WANT to play with 10,000 others on a server. They want to be in a guild and want to group while doing things within the game. While some soloability is usually put int
      • I don't play them, but lately, the better games are being developed as MMOGs. Especially RPG-style games for the PC.

        Fortunately, there are a few on the horizon (Dungeon Siege 2, Elder Scrolls IV...) that are not MMOG.
      • I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to want to play multi-player games rather than few-players,many-asshat games the the majority of MMORPGs have become.
    • Morrowind and Arcanum are two nice standalone RPGs. There may be more recent ones, but those are the last ones I played before making the MMO transition a couple years ago.

      I'd like to see MMORPGs offer one or more premium shards (at 2x or 3x the subscription cost) which run on faster hardware, do not allow minors (as best as can be enforced), and have faster customer support response.

      I like having a lot of people around, I just want an option to dilute the idiot concentration.

    • The PC Market seems to have become devoid of RPGs as of late, which is unfortunate, but there's still the console realm...

      No, I won't recommend Final Fantasy. But I will recommend Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, for PS2. Good story. If you've played any of the Persona games (PS 1), then you'll be comforted to know this is by the same people who did that.

      Just avoid Square Enix and you should be fine, when it comes to console RPGs....
    • Guild Wars [guildwars.com] may be for you then. In is a MMORG, but not really. It is based heavely on a more or less linear story, divided into missions, like most single player games. You can play each mission with other a party of other people, or with NPC henchmen. The henchmen are not quite as strong as the player characters, but sometimes smarter. During a mission, you won't meet anyone outside your party.

      You meet other players at towns and outposts (each mission start at an outpost), as well as at the PvP area

  • I like the Top Ten Reasons NOT to... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bennomatic ( 691188 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @11:25AM (#11362618) Homepage
    There's some real truth there. But many of those reasons are addressed by the open source model. It's just a pity that there aren't more OSMMOGs out there. Tried out PlaneShift the other day, but while it's really neat in a lot of ways, it's got a ways to go in development.

  • more charts for those that like charts (Score:5, Informative)

    by bartash ( 93498 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @11:32AM (#11362732)
    There's a great chart on page 8 of TFA which shows the number of subscribers to the major MMORPGs. I was curious and found the source of the charts, it's Bruce Sterling Woodcock's site [mmogchart.com] and there's a newer version of the chart I liked here [mmogchart.com], and there are lots more.

  • Mailing Lists (Score:3, Funny)

    by pdamoc ( 771461 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @12:05PM (#11363264) Homepage
    Mailing Lists are THE best MMORPG.
    Pros:
    * They are free...
    * You get to choose from a multitude of roles: "programmer", "translator", "artist", "docwriter"
    * as in all MMORPGs you get to make new friends.
    * you get to use really big tools like Google and SF.net
    * sometimes you might even get a real job out of this game where someone pays you to play all day.
    Cons:
    * graphical quality varies with the level/character...
    * some level/character combinations might be a little bit boring

  • thesis project from 1999 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hin72 ( 665164 ) on Friday January 14, 2005 @12:06PM (#11363296) Homepage

    My undergrad thesis with a colleague of mine, back in 1999, was essentially a very, very simple realisation of persistent worlds. We created a three-dimensional version of Pong where all activity in one-half of the arena (in our case it was a cube) was handled by one machine. The other half was, obviously, processed on the second machine. The communication between hosts only consisted of periodic heartbeats and the movement deltas of the paddles. Rendering, I/O, physics and the predictive calculations were all done locally (i.e., the machine on which the person was controlling his/her paddle). When we took one machine offline, the user on the still-active machine was notified but was permitted to simply bounce the sphere against the interior of the cube until he/she got bored.

    Our game was written in C using Mesa [mesa3d.org] (a 3D graphics library with an API which is very similar to that of OpenGL). Our development machines were IBM boxes running RedHat Linux 5.x. We got the rendering code all working on Solaris machines too. For networking we used UDP and referred to the Stevens book alot.

    The ultimate goal of our humble project was to split our arena into octants. Once all eight (8) machines were online we would remove N < 8 machines from the cluster and see how the remaining machines handled the loss of nodes. Because the network is no longer receiving heartbeats from a given machine, another machine would take responsibility and inherit all the process duties thereafter. Ideally, this transfer of duties is totally transparent to all who are watching and/or playing the game.

    What drove our desire investigate persistent worlds back in 1999 was my interest in Quake 2 CTF and deathmatch. To hop from one server to the next the user had to explicity exit the server and reconnect to another. I would have preferred if I could seemlessly "walk through a doorway in the game world" and find myself in a different environment. In the background, of course, all network traffic came from a totally different host running a Quake 2 CTF / deathmatch server.

    • That sounds like it was an excellent Thesis. Did you get any usable results from your experiment, or did it terminate when you recieved your thesis grade (as mine and hundreds of thousands of others did)?

      • Upon graduation in early 2000, my career path steered me away from everything remotely associated with the project. As the years went on I really wanted to revisit my thesis at the Masters level and do things properly. The undergrad thesis was more of a hack really but we did learn, from a hands-on approach, how to tackle some network communication issues which I'm sure online games of 2005 already have addressed.

        Our heartbeat was fixed at 20Hz (i.e., twenty times a second, a host would essentially br

  • Before the flames come let me state that this is not a PRO xxx Title comment.

    I started playing Ultima Online in 1997 and have quit and returned 3 different times (currently playing). I've tried Motor City Online (defunct), Ascheron's Call (Micro Crap!), Star Wars Galaxies (pretty cool) and so on.

    What needs to be understood is that when people invest a lot of time, money and energy in a game they want it to be gratifying. The problem is that when they find something like that it makes it very hard to
  • The stats are from someone else's site, and the technology discussion is at a very low level. There's some naive economic discussion. The section on dealing with "griefing" is the strongest section.

    There are many serious omissions. Issues like "how do we fill up a big world with content", "how do we keep everybody from piling up in the good areas", as well as the critical "what can people do in the world" are unaddressed.

    • I agree that it could be stronger in lots of ways, and the technology section is deliberately low-level. Frankly I'm not sure it's useful to even have a technology section, and came close to killing it, but remember our focus; independent developers who are thinking about going into MMPs, not big-co's and experienced MMP developers.

      And yes, there are ommissions. Volunteer to contribute to the update and next year's paper!

      I'm not sure what you mean about naive economic discussion, though.

  • I'm in the midst of coding a small graphical mud as a hobby, just to play with some new ideas and exercize my code skills.

    Part of that mud will be a persistant world.

    I can see someone reading this whitepaper, patenting something as blatently obvious as "persistant world through database storage" and suing me.

    Oh well, if it involves computers, it must be revolutionary, right?

    (Do other fields get patents as blatently obvious as IT? "Mechanism to attach widget arm to wodget flapper with chain" pa

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