"Worst. Presentation. Ever."

Three words:

Bring back Abyss.

I’ll echo that. EQ was often referred to even by its own users as DikuMUD 2.0 or similar. Every one knew it was a direct ripoff of Diku, but no one really cared because hey, 3D graphics and hey, you weren’t forced to be the victim for sociopathic gankers.

At that time, the standards for MMO success weren’t very high because you had one or two competitors, tops.

>>The slams on his credibility are especially amusing. You do realize he worked on the first MUD, right. You know. The first one. PATIENT ZERO. This does give you a bit of credibility. At least for those people who don’t believe game development history began with the launch date of their current favorite MMO.<<

Just because he worked on the first MUD doesn’t matter. Nolan Bushnell worked on what is close to the first video game and see how relevant he is to gaming theory today. F13 was saying more that the problem was not that he didn’t have MUD achievements, but that is all he has, he has no real experience shipping a product or working with modern MMOs. Yet he is still a pundit being paid money to give keynotes.

I have no bones in this myself, I’m just a player appreciating reading the theory in this, but the best test of Bartle’s theory is for him to get investors up and to make an MMO. If the guy working on love can, he should be able to.

It’s an odd thing, I mean if he knows the solution, why not make it? He’s far better connected than the average forum junkie to do so.

GregC :To say all the problems were solved back in the “good ol’ days” of MUD is wrong.

It is indeed. I don’t actually say that, though, do I? Did you notice that part where I said that Alice worlds really suck at keeping newbies? Where gave that EvE Online learning curve slide I ripped off from Damion Schubert’s site? See, what I was saying there is that today’s MMOs do something well that the old ones did badly. They solve a problem that wasn’t even recognised back then.

I am sure many designers – including guys working on WoW and the numerous other MMO games in development would love to do some of things Bartle talks about being the “right” thing.

So am I. I would ask, though, why, if they feel this way, they don’t say it at conferences themselves, or at least blog about it. If it’s such a universal feeling, it shouldn’t have to be down to me to say it – they can write about some “ideal” MMO just as easily as I can.

It may also be worth remembering that I was speaking at IMGDC, not at GDC. My audience was people who are working on or interested in indie MMOs. They are never, ever going to be able to make a WoW clone. They have big problems in creating good content in sufficient a quantity that people won’t play it out in a month. This was a talk to them; it was not a talk to people who have publisher money and a 200-strong development team behind them.

Bartle gets paid to speak

No he doesn’t. I speak at IMGDC because I’m passionate about the future of virtual worlds. This is why Jess Mulligan and Damion Schubert were also there; we don’t get paid to speak, we do it because we believe in it.

The same applies to all such events. My expenses are covered (although in general I still wind up out of pocket), but there’s no fee involved. Very, very occasionally, academic conferences will provide a small remuneration, but that’s only happened maybe twice in the past 5 years.

Don’t think that I’m raking money in from being on some kind of conference circuit. I speak for free, gratis.

That way, no-one can ask for their money back, heh.

Richard

Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green :
I was the speaker organizer for the conference. I handled the speaker proposals and sent out information to the people accepted to speak. Perhaps you should have visited the IMGDC site and submitted a proposal? Just understand that a bearded guy named “Psychochild” is going to visit you after-hours of the conference with a bat if your talk sucks.

You make that sound pretty easy. I’ll consider it the next time around, though I generally never have the money or time to travel outside of the northwest.

@Richard Bartle
To be fair Richard – I did not mean you get paid to speak at things like IMGDC – what I mean is you do not earn a living – as far as I know – actually making the things you constantly speak about.

My greater point is this: I do think your tone (from my perception and a lot of other people’s perception) is often “I know better – we did this and that in MUD” – but you never actually made a modern MMO game. So while you insights from MUD days are useful, to an extent, you really miss the realities of modern development and outside of the type of player who reads this blog you are often missing what the average MMO player does/needs/wants from their game.

I think the slides were reasonable and generated discussion and thought, as intended.

No rational person would think Richard Bartle is the Messiah of Games, but rather another developer with a lot more experience than some dev teams combined. Doesn’t mean he’s always “right”, but it does mean we can learn what we wish from his experiences.

What I want is to hear the soundtrack along with the slides! I hope it was recorded … as Lum stated, the slides alone from a good presenter are lacking. Any link?

GregC :
@Richard Bartle
To be fair Richard – I did not mean you get paid to speak at things like IMGDC – what I mean is you do not earn a living – as far as I know – actually making the things you constantly speak about.

OK, well that’s indeed correct. I’m on several advisory boards for MMO developers, and I do get periodic consultancy gigs advising other people who make these things (although they’ve dried up with this economic recession), but I don’t make money from making MMOs myself. I did do that for a dozen or more years (albeit with textual worlds), but I had to stop when the dot com bubble burst.

The reason I don’t make them is not because I don’t want to make them, or am incapable of making them: it’s because I would have to persuade someone to cast a “rain of money” spell on me. Despite what many forum ranters seem to think, I can’t just knock on a publisher’s door, say, “Hi, I’m Richard Bartle; if you give me $50m I’ll make you an MMO”, and expect to get it. I especially can’t do that in England, where I live.

My greater point is this: I do think your tone (from my perception and a lot of other people’s perception) is often “I know better – we did this and that in MUD” – but you never actually made a modern MMO game.

So you want me to make a modern MMO game just so I can say the same things I would have said anyway? Yeah, right – and then 3 years later you’d tell me I had to make another one because the one I’d made was out of date…

Some things, we did do in MUDs. Plenty more things we didn’t. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to raise my hand occasionally when people are asking questions to which we do already know the answers, though. It’s not as if I do it the whole time – it’s just that people don’t notice when I don’t do it, they only notice when I do.

Also, beware of using this “your time has passed” argument: as I am now, so you shall be. If you believe that it’s valid to discredit someone for having been around too long, your own words can be used against you in a decade or two when you too, have been around too long…

So while you insights from MUD days are useful, to an extent, you really miss the realities of modern development and outside of the type of player who reads this blog you are often missing what the average MMO player does/needs/wants from their game.

I see the realities of modern development. Sure, I don’t roll up my sleeves every day and sweat blood writing code, but I do get to see what goes on in studios first hand.

As for what “the average MMO player” does/needs/wants, I’m pretty sure I have a better sense of that than you do as I actually take trouble to watch what people do, think about why they do it, unearth what their deeper needs are, assess their more immediate wants, and I’ve done so for 30 years. I don’t use “the average MMO player” as a cipher for “me”.

Look, this may surprise you to learn, but I don’t actually want to be relevant. Things should have moved on much further than they have now – my job should be done. People younger than me should have taken the baton and run with it. We should have glorious new worlds, original in ways old-timers like me have never conceived. I shouldn’t have to tell people how things are, I should be reading what young turks are saying and think, “why didn’t that occur to me?” or “I can’t wait to see this!”.

To be fair, there are indeed people who fit this bill – there just aren’t enough of them, and half are probably in China. So it falls to me to keep lighting occasional small fires, in the hope that someone, somewhere, will catch a spark and it will ignite their imagination.

So long as what I say can cause people to think more deeply about MMOs, I’ll continue to say it. I’ll endure the ad hominem attacks from people who have completely misinterpreted my words, or who haven’t read them in the first place, or who are just regular griefers, because I’m passionate about the future of MMOs. I want to see better virtual worlds.

If you don’t think I’m relevant, don’t read what I say. I prepared that talk for a conference at which you weren’t present; you had to go out of your way to read my slides. Why are you complaining?! No-one made you read the slides – you’re moaning because some of the other people who read them thought the slides made a reasonable argument.

When I think I’m no longer relevant, then I’ll retire; and, because if I’m no longer relevant it means virtual worlds will have moved on in beautiful and exhilerating ways, I really, really DON’T want to be relevant.

Richard

geldonyetich :
I think the main critique I’d level against Bartle here is that speaking in abstractions is easy.

It’s also necessary when you only have 45 minutes to make your point from a standing start…

Besides, if it’s as easy as you say, how come we haven’t seen this point made multiple times before? Speaking in abstractions is only easy if you make those abstractions in the first place.

The devil in the details, and one can’t help but feel a bit of contempt to the academic at the podium when you’re down and dirty in the trenches. Sure, they might have a point, but the inspiration is the easy part, perspiration is what you need the most help with.

It’s mildly amusing that industry people complain I’m an academic; academics complain I’m an industry person…

The people in the IMGDC audience were smart cookies; they didn’t need me to tell them the details of how to implement any of these the ideas – as designers, the possibilities would just open up before them. If what I said was appropriate to their MMO, then they’d be the ones who’d know best what to do with it in their situation, not me. In fact, some of them did know, and we discussed it afterwards.

I wasn’t giving a technical talk. I was giving a keynote to a group of indie developers. Like it or not, I’m in a position where I can help move MMO design forwards; I want it to move forwards, and that’s what I hoped in some small way my talk would achieve. If you want technical talks of more immediate use to you, then you were wise not to attend my keynote; it wasn’t that kind of talk. If you think IMGDC should have technical keynotes instead of rabble-rousing ones, take it up with the organisers.

My other main critique with Bartle is he tends to categorize things. Killers, Socializers, Explorers, Achievers. Dorothy, Alice, Wendy.

Yes, go on. My player types, these world types, and ..?

Well?

From two examples separated by over a decade, you can discern a tendency to categorise things?

However, the loss of fidelity that may come with label is problematic. Especially if the label is taken too literally as a substitute for the thing it describes. In sorting our players into categories, be fairly certain you’ll eventually reach a point where you satisfy no real player.

Ah, how soon people forget…

Before that player types paper appeared, the vast majority of virtual worlds were created by people who took the view that what they liked, all their players would like. They didn’t consider that people play virtual worlds for different reasons; they didn’t consider that a healthy virtual world needed a variety of players holding different ideas as to what’s “fun”.

Loss of fidelity? We had no fidelity at all before!

Richard

geldonyetich :
“Content” is a difficult label to adequately encapsulate sometimes, but player characters wear that label poorly for some reason. Perhaps because it seems redundant for player characters to be content consumed by player characters. Perhaps because players seek something outside of eachother, or else they might as well just be in a chat room.

I will go out on a limb here and posit that, short of opening up development tools to the public, there is no more cost efficient way to keep players playing than to divide them into two or more groups and pit them against one another. Ironically, the games that take this approach (pvp + tools) the furthest are FPSes, which don’t make more money the longer you play.

New content like zones, monsters, and quests are consumed and digested before the patch even leaves the test server, and are obsolete a few months later. Killing other players has been compelling content since killing things became possible.

Richard, I agree with your presntaion points pretty much and wish there was an avatar based game like that.

But a comment.
I guess you didnt understand that comment on your player types.
The general feeling among gamers I know is that they are arbitrary and lead what developers who pay attention to them astray.

To better tools for development they should be closer to real psychology, because the motivations in game are the motivations of the people behind the toon.
Particularly confounding is “killer.(since no one dies in 99% of MMOs its really about either dominance or achievement)”
Particularly broad and vague is “achiever.”

dartwick :
Richard, I agree with your presntaion points pretty much and wish there was an avatar based game like that.
But a comment.
The general feeling among gamers I know is that they are arbitrary and lead what developers who pay attention to them astray.

At the risk of starting a whole new anti-Bartle thread…

The player types are not arbitrary. They arose from my summarising of a lengthy discussion, and at that point they were indeed arbitrary (in the sense that they could have been incomplete, or overlapping, or just one of many ways of partitioning players’ motivations). However, the addition of a theoretical mechanism to organise them removed this arbitrariness.

The theory as published is complete (for people who play MMOs for fun), because there’s no room for adding a “fifth type”; if you think there is an extra type that the theory can’t account for, OK, produce it. The theory will instantly fall apart, and hopefully we’ll get a better theory in its stead. I have to say, though, that in the dozen or so years since the paper was published, we haven’t seen such a “fifth type” that actually holds water.

The player types are also non-overlapping. You can’t be two types at the same time. You can be transitioning between them, but you can’t be both a socialiser and an explorer, say. There are other typographies which have types I don’t have, notably Nick Yee’s (which has “immersion” as a motivation). However, players can be trying to become immersed while being an explorer at the same time.

The accusation that this is just one way of describing players is valid. There are others out there. None that I know of have any underlying theory to explain why things are the way they are, nor do they offer any predictive capability; often they’re just lists of player personalities that the author has generalised. That doesn’t mean they’re incorrect, but it does mean they don’t offer my player types theory much competition. It’s fine to say you’ve noticed (or discovered through thorough statistical analysis) a particular set of common play styles, or common needs, or common attitudes, but knowing they exist isn’t in itself of much use: you need to know WHY they exist if you’re to make much capital from them.

My player types theory has some traction because designers (the people for whom it was primarily devised) have found it useful. That’s the ONLY reason it didn’t sink without trace. If nothing else, it allows them to communicate with non-designers using a common vocabulary.

As for leading developers astray, again, recall that back in the mid-1990s developers didn’t move at all. On the whole, they designed games that they wanted to play, and if you didn’t play for the same reasons as them then times were going to be lean. At least my player types theory alerted some of these up-coming designers to the notion that, you know, we may whinge about these carebears or these spreadsheeters or these griefers, but things wouldn’t really be the same without them.

That said, there is a plausible argument that says that the reason my player types theory applies to MMOs is because so many of them were designed according to its principles that it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This means that what was originally intended to free designers has wound up constraining them. This is, in fact, an argument with which I have some sympathy.

If you believe that my theory is leading designers astray, then the solution is to present a new theory – or even a manifesto of ideas around which a new theory can later be developed. We need to know: what’s wrong with my theory (not merely that it is wrong – WHERE and HOW it leads people astray); where designers should be heading instead (and WHY); some indication of the steps designers should take to get back on track (not merely that they should get back – we need to know HOW to get them back on track).

If you can say that, then we’re in with a chance.

My player types theory should have been superseded a long time ago. That it’s still valid is a constant source of disappointment to me. I was hoping that by now we’d have much better ideas of how and why players do what they do, and therefore better virtual worlds as a consequence. Judging by new research that’s coming out, it’s looking increasingly likely that my player types model is correct; that doesn’t mean it’s always useful, though (after all, 2+2=4 is correct, but you wouldn’t use it as a basis for MMO design).

Particularly confounding is “killer.(since no one dies in 99% of MMOs its really about either dominance or achievement)”
Particularly broad and vague is “achiever.”

You know about the 8-types version of the theory I developed in my book 6 years ago, right? There’s an unadorned summary of it here: http://mud.co.uk/richard/VWWPP.pdf .

Richard

I was not familiar with the advanced categorization. And indeed its a better fit although it may simply be the more catagories you add the more it covers.

But it still doesnt suit the underlying issue.
Games are aimed at real people and could be better designed with respect to human psychology not “avatar psychology”(which is basically a filtered reflection of why the human is doing what he/she is doing.)

Probably a better system would matrix, motivation by preferred mode of opperation..
Power, security, achievement, grouping, and knowlege, and indexed by socializing, work, violence, research/searching, deceit, and theft for instance.
Im not supposing those are the best categories but I am suggesting the format more closely can represent why and how people will play games.

Anyway I didnt mean this as an attack. I really liked the points of the presentation and the original 4 groups have surely given some much needed perspective to developers who were often making games for themselves rather than an audience..

Another thing: Hiring a peron in your market that are not qualificated and asking your family/friends doesnt count as a market research.

Baredil :

dartwick :
Games are aimed at real people and could be better designed with respect to human psychology

I think just about every post I’ve read, here and elsewhere, that comes out against the Bartle types does so with some variation of this idea; an objection to the idea that human psychology can be so completely categorized into such a small range of types. Humans are much to complicated for that!
I hate to break this to you, but you are not a unique and beautiful snowflake. Human behaviour can be quite predictable in a disturbingly narrow range of ways. Psychologists and marketing departments have known this for decades. Asimov predicted it in the 1940’s.

You hit right in the target. IMO, the anti-Bartle guys that you mention use that as an excuse for: I want to design games for me. Oh please, cry me a river (QQ more, noobs). Videogames can be for all audiences, not just your WoW copies/PvP harcordness.

Somewhat tangentially, Wiqd and I have rambled a bit about “classless” design as well as a handful of other design concepts that try to go past what the “accepted MMO design handbook” might suggest. “Me too” design is increasingly shallow, unprofitable and stagnant (the natural result of a saturated market). The genre really should be growing and learning, innovating and mutating, but we just tend to get WoW clones, even if it’s just the business model that’s mutating. (Runes of Magic being the poster child there.) That’s unsatisfying as a designer and as a player.

I am reading all of Bartle’s comments while listening to “Rule Britannia”.

It is awesome.

Maybe players are different from each other in the same way that all people are different from each other, but that doesn’t have to mean that people are different from each other in strange or specific ways just because the world is virtual instead of real.

Fuck it, I’m going to bed.

@neispace

It’s amazing how people will comment about someone’s experience without really knowing the whole picture. Richard Bartle often consults with MMOG/Virtual World companies when they are building their games, including working with Raph Koster and others you may (or may not) have heard of.

Also of note, I am the owner of IMGDC and we don’t pay speakers to speak, they do it to give back to the community. You can’t look at Bartle’s slides and assume you have the whole picture, because you simply don’t.

VPellen :
The main thing that gets me is that while you often call out other people’s player types for being somewhat arbitrary, I fear you might be guilty of the same thing on a lower level; The axes around which your playertypes are defined also seem rather arbitrary.

The types came first; the axes followed. If I’d created the axes first and then described the types, sure, that would have been arbitrary. However, I identified the types first and then looked for what they had in common. The labels on the axes went through several iterations before they were nailed down (see this early version that I wrote for a magazine, for example: http://mud.co.uk/richard/wpm.htm). Thus, the labels could well be arbitrary, but if they are then the player types themselves are.

The main issue I have is that you said that the playertypes are non-overlapping. In this, I must call bullshit. Why would they be?

They can be overlapping over time, because people transition between them. At any one moment, however, they are not overlapping.

That said, my theory is strong at explaining how people change types over a long period of time, but weak at explaining how they change types during playing sessions; it acknowledges that this happens, but can’t explain why. There is an explanation for this, though, which I heard about earlier this year from a researcher in Germany (coming from a psychology background, she’d basically rediscovered the player types model herself). I can’t point you at anything that explains it, though, because it’s not been published yet.

What’s bugs me even more is that if people cared dominantly about the players, they’d pick chatrooms. If they card dominantly about the world, they’d pick a single player sandbox game. You say that you can’t be more than one type, but the whole appeal of virtual worlds is that you’ve got other people within a world. Am I missing something horribly obvious here?

Some people do like chatrooms; some people do like single-player games. There’s nothing wrong with that.

What the presence of other people who don’t necessarily like what you like buys you is validation. The world feels like a world if there are other people there, doing all the interesting things other people do. Even if you hate those other people, you need them to compare yourself against. MMOs are not a medium, they’re places. If it feels like a place, you can visit it as a place; this opens up the whole hero’s journey thing.

But the more I think about it, the more absurd it seems to divide people based on their preference of “world” vs “people” in a medium which depends entirely on the unity of world and people.

And yet, if you were to perform a study of tens of thousands of people, asking them a wide variety of questions to nail down what they find to be fun in virtual worlds, you will discover that they come up with the same answers that they always did. Check out Nick Yee’s work: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/print/001298.php . This maps directly onto my 8-types model (the “immersion” component is how far along the development tracks you’ve gone. Ultimately, using the hero’s journey argument, all players are seeking immersion; the player types just describe what stage they’re at right now).

The playertypes model likely gained popularity not so much because it was brilliantly correct, but because.. well, because you were there first, the theory was there first, and you’re quite a good speaker.

All this may well be true, although I don’t personally think my being a good speaker has anything to do with it as it was the paper that sparked all the interest, not the presentations I’ve given based on it (which are few and far between). Nevertheless, just because I was there first and the theory was there first, that doesn’t mean it’s incorrect, it merely explains its popularity.

Also, there aren’t actually any other theories in this area. There are categorisations, there are diagrams, but none of them come with models that can be used predictively, nor that can explain exactly why people play MMOs.

It’s not really that surprisingly that an analysis of the players in the first MUD also happens to carry on remarkably well to all its predecessors. But then again, what is a genre if not a perpetual string of duplicates based on an original model?

I don’t follow what you’re complaining about here. If people want to make something that is a descendant of MUD1, and my theory applies to such things, that seems a reasonable thing for them to do. I make no claims that my theory applies to any other field (other people do – sometimes with good evidence that it does – but I don’t claim that myself). If you’re saying that there may be a class of MMOs out there that have yet to be discovered which, because my theory only applies to those we know about, it won’t apply to, well yes, I guess that would be the case. I’m not saying my theory does apply to those, though, nor does it prevent other people from going out there and making them.

Jeez, I used to get complaints that my theory was rubbish because didn’t apply to stuff, and now I get complaints that it applies to everything…

MUD was simple, but it wasn’t that simple.

It wasn’t simple.

World and players are very simple and distinct, sure, but it’s never so simple. Interacting with the world in order to act on the players? Or acting on the players in order to interact with the world?

If you [do whatever] to act on the players, then you’re in the killer quadrant. If you [do whatever] in order to interact with the world, you’re in the explorer quadrant. It’s not what people do, it’s why they do it that’s important here.

Also, yet again I’m going to say that yes, this model is general, but it’s still a great deal more specific than what went before it. If you want a more detailed model still, OK, let’s see it. If you’re saying that no model can ever be detailed enough so it’s a waste of time having any model, look up what happened to GoPets once they added achiever content to their previously all-socialiser world.

Richard

Richard Bartle :
However, politicians can be damaging, too. They’re usually fine so long as people do what they say, but some can get mean if challenged. If you object to the way your guild is going and it has a politician in charge, OK, some may talk it through and come to a compromise but others will level all kinds of accusations against you about selfishness, guild drama, being a prima donna – whatever it takes to get people on their side and not on yours.

Ahh. Sounds like the “Drama Queens”. I’ve seen guilds with these people at the top, and said guilds have tended to implode.

I’m realizing as I write this that people go to cheat sites because the game is too challenging

Sometimes, yes, this is the case. At other times, people do it because they’re not interested in solving the problem, they just want the XP or the loot or the rep or whatever. Alternatively, they may know how to find the answer but it’s just too tiresome to go through the motions. For example, when you make the Fish Feast in WoW, one of the ingredients is a musselback sculpin. Where do you catch these? Well obviously you can go fish for 10 minutes in every zone until you find one that has a ready supply of musselback sculpins, or you can just look it up and save yourself an hour of tedium. OK, Borean Tundra, I’ll go there then. It’s not that finding the solution is too challenging, it’s just that it’s too time-consuming.

So what you need is some way to find out, in game, where you get musselback sculpins.

Think of it this way: The world was not created 6 days ago. The people of this world have been around for hundreds if not thousands of years. During this time, this sort of thing should be documented and known. Fishing books that tell you where to find these fish. Libraries with reference books. “Old Salts” that you can buy a beer for in the inns and have them tell you legends and lore.

Instead, these games all take the view that no one has been there before, and you have to find out everything. And once you do, you can’t leave anything written down for the people that follow you.

There has to be enough clues/information/details in-game to make cheat sites pointless.

And explorers redundant?

No. Finding the right balance. Yes, some people will just want to try every place. Some people will go to cheat sites. But right now, it is more of “you have to”, rather than “you want to”.

What if there’s a large lake, well known to have fish type X, and you can go there and fish. But with all the people going there, it can be fished out — you might have to wait for the respawn.

Now, you have choices:
1. Find and read the books of lore in-game that tell you of that lake
2. Go to a cheat site out-of-game that tells you the same thing,
3. Explore all the lakes, and find the out-of-the-way fishing hole that isn’t overfished and also provides the goal.

But wouldn’t it be interesting if …
4. The game isn’t static — if out-of-the-way fishing hole #1 is heavily fished, it dries up for a while and reduces the spawn rate. But out-of-the-way fishing hole #2 and #3 have been ignored for a few days — they are now spawning. (And if holes 1,2, and 3 all get overfished regularly (they are on the cheat sites), the hidden fishing spots are changed — the fish aren’t there any more, and are now at other spots.)

Balancing #4 against an increasing server population is the hard part — increasing server population will result in a need to spawn more at the same time that the locations are all being overfished.

As far as I know, WoW completely ignores the server population issue — if the population is low, harvestable items are in abundance, and if the population is high, there’s artificial scarcity.

(Contrast: Puzzle Pirates altered their spawn system about 3 years ago to scale with demand because of this issue as they grew.)

Now, looking at your other big idea: Games need to start as Dorthy, and go to Alice. When you transition from the game’s guided path to player-generated, emergent content, you are moving into a PvP area of play. How do you manage to discourage the griefers at this point? How do you prevent people from being ganked?

You don’t. You give the players the means to do it themselves.

Ahh. Any ideas on how? (Serious question.)

how do you keep the people who lose from being so devastated that they cannot keep competing with loss after loss?

Well ideally they’d have the means to take action such that they don’t lose time and time again. If they still don’t like it, OK, well I guess for them it’s back to Dorothy mode again. There’s no requirement that people switch to Alice mode if they don’t want to.

I think it was about a year ago that either baseball or football realized that people didn’t go to see team X, they went to see team X fight team Y; if team Y wasn’t able to fight team X, then team X suffered even if team X was winning. The conclusion was to share more of the revenue with the losing team, and to impose limits on how much the winning teams could pull ahead of the losing teams, to make sure that the losing teams weren’t completely ruined.

Blood Bowl — “Football in a medieval fantasy setting” — does the same thing — the underdog gets playing incentives that are sufficient, in theory, to close about 80% of the gap between the two teams.

Paper and pencil RPGs: A good GM will find some way to give the underdog players, and important villains, some edge.

Computer/MMO RPG’s: What do they have to prevent imbalance? You have two goals: Attract new players that are not yet protected by a guild, and keep those who are in a guild. You might have the goal of keep those that don’t want to be in a guild. But ultimately, what do you do to protect underdogs?

You don’t. You give the players the means to do it themselves.

Ahh. Any ideas on how? (Serious question.)

In short, it really looks like the goals of the two papers are in conflict — one says that you want to have the game stop guiding and rewarding you (no more quests, etc), which in turn says that you are going to player-generated feedback of success, and the other says that you want to encourage explorers, which requires game-generated feedback of success.

Explorers don’t need game-generated feedback of success, they just want to understand systems.

Look at the transitions to the bottom 4th position (the “endgame” for explorers).

You have to go through “Planner”. You have to have game-generated feedback of success.

(Incidentally, how do you go about getting work in the game design field?)

Same as any other field: talent and luck.
Richard

Keybounce

“

Keybounce : how do you keep the people who lose from being so devastated that they cannot keep competing with loss after loss?

The obvious answer is to make losing at pvp fun. Here are some things that make losing fun:
1. Feeling that you had a chance.
2. Learning what you could do better next time.
3. Prospect for revenge.
4. Going out in a dramatic gesture.
5. Gracious behavior by the winner.
6. Team solidarity (misery loves company)
7. Consequences of losing can be repaired with reasonable effort.

Not all of these can be coded in, but some can:

1. Level based handicapping. De-emphasis on grind based factors in combat.
2. Combat recording and replay.
3. Bounty system and/or ability to track people who killed you.
4. Easy communication during a fight. Perhaps some kamikaze abilities as well.

and most importantly:

7. A sliding scale of consequences to combat, depending on the context.

To make PvP fun – the gain (fun) to be had from PvPing has to outweigh the cost from losing (both material loss, and the grief and anguish of not being a winner – which seems to be a real problem for some people ). It works if the cost isn’t too bad and the PvP is fun even in the fights you lose. Keep the cost down by minimising how much grief can be caused – e.g. mechanics to prevent being spawn camped – as well as the game penalties for PvP deaths.

as for players policing gankers – the most elegant method I can think of is a bounty system. The more a player griefs others, the more people who chip in to increase the price on his head – and you get an emergent end game career of bounty hunter.

Conferences and their speakers are about delivering perspectives and information. Working on the first MUD gives you a lifetime license for a unique perspective that some people will find interesting forever. There is not a certification committee that decides who is relevant or not.

Since the first MUD, the only important progress has been graphics and mass marketing. Everything that I’ve seen in Wow or other MMOs I remember as a feature in earlier MUDs in some form.

Therefore, I feel that Bartle after all these years, is still very relevant. Regarding repetitious presentations, why not say the same thing repeatedly if nothing has truly changed since you started talking?