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?

Further, the UO respawn system meant that there was no such thing as spawn camping, because you chose where you respawned, either at a wandering healer or in a safe zone, so unless you foolishly res’ed in the vicinity of enemies, you usually never had to worry about res spawn camping.

Games that require you to camp PvE spawns for uber purple trinkets make the anguish of losing at PvP worse, because not only do you risk the material loss of the item in some cases, you lose all the time invested in acquiring that item. PvE designed this way serves to break PvP.

The more rules that games impose to ‘improve’ pvp, in my opinion, only seem to make it less attractive. If you don’t want your players ‘traumatized’ by pvp, don’t allow PvP at all. For many players, that is what they want anyway, so let them gather their PvE loot and be happy. If you do allow PvP, make it cheap, and make it easy, and don’t require a lot of PvE to support the PvP. Those enjoy PvP will appreciate it, and those who don’t care for PvP will be playing something else, anyway. Forcing PvEers to live with PvPers makes the PvEers unhappy, and forcing PvPers to grind PvE mobs when they would rather be fighting other players instead doesn’t seem like a brilliant game design either.

You can’t please all of the people all of the time, which is an old saying I think I first heard in kindergarten, but for some reason, is universally ignored by game designers. Yes, I know game companies would really love to have a zillion subcribers for their one-size-fits-all monolithic game design, but it seems like a waste of development time, money, and effort to build game elements that large parts of your audience doesn’t really want in the first place.

Instead, I would think that a game company would maximize it’s profits by developing smaller games targeted to different player types. Achiever games for achievers, explorer games for explorers, socializing games for socializers, and killer games for killers. Sure, you will get some crossover, because even in a PvP game, there is some scouting to be done, so killers with a bit of explorer in them will like that, and managing a player guild will appeal to the PvE achiever who also enjoys the socialization part, but trying to include all features in equal measure just doesn’t seem to work all that well.

Pick a genere, and capitalize on that one facet of play and make those players deleriously happy in that niche. Do that for each player type, and you’ll have a lot of deleriously happy players dumping piles of money on you for the priveledge of playing your games rather than a bunch of disatisfied customers who try your one-size-fits-all game for a while, but who end up leaving for the Next Big Release in a futile attempt to find what they are looking for.

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.

Alex :
“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.”
Tragedy of the Commons. There’s no point for an individual to conserve, since somebody else will get the fish you don’t.
End result: If lots people want to fish, it will be very hard to find a spot where there is anything to catch, plus you’ll spend a lot of frustrated time running from spot to spot.
Alternatively, if not many people want to fish, the system is irrelevant, and you can catch fish wherever. Only with the exact right number of fishermen would this provide any positive impact to gameplay.
I’d also argue that arbitrary switches in a resource’s location undermine an explorer’s achievements. If you had to check 100 lakes to find a great fishing spot, you sure as hell don’t want to check the same 100 over again when it moves.

Interestingly, Puzzle Pirates has solved most of these.

Supply level of raw commodities (the “fish”) scale based on demand as seen by the shops where those fish are used to produce usable items. When you had foraging for raw commodities (it was removed because of exploits), you could either spend your “labor time units” on foraging, or in shops constructing stuff from the raw goods. Do nothing but forage? Can’t construct. Doing nothing but constructing? Gotta buy the raws from others.

“End result: If lots people want to fish, it will be very hard to find a spot where there is anything to catch”
What if the game’s basic rule is that item X will be generated based on player population — if there are 100 active players, then 10 of these will spawn per day. Lots and lots of fisher people, if things are well designed, will happen when there are lots and lots of players.

Really valuable item used in high-end stuff? Ok, lots of people will want it. Maybe only high-end fisher folks can land it?

Maybe well-known spot X has a large capacity buffer — 30 unfished fish can swim in it, but it restores fish at a slow rate. Less-well-known spot Y has a small buffer (smaller pond) — it can only hold 2 or 3 unfished fish. But it breeds them faster.

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.

Tragedy of the Commons. There’s no point for an individual to conserve, since somebody else will get the fish you don’t.

End result: If lots people want to fish, it will be very hard to find a spot where there is anything to catch, plus you’ll spend a lot of frustrated time running from spot to spot.

Alternatively, if not many people want to fish, the system is irrelevant, and you can catch fish wherever. Only with the exact right number of fishermen would this provide any positive impact to gameplay.

I’d also argue that arbitrary switches in a resource’s location undermine an explorer’s achievements. If you had to check 100 lakes to find a great fishing spot, you sure as hell don’t want to check the same 100 over again when it moves.

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 :
It seems that since “Killers” includes “Politicians”, which turns into “Guild leader”, it is really “Griefer”, or “Playground bully” that is the nasty game killer.

They’re the most in-your-face variety, yes. 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.

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.

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

And explorers redundant?

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. You might want to structure things such that greifers can’t do anything that would kill the game off even if they were to organise and purposefully try to do it, but if you remove conflict then where’s the story going to come from?

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.

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. Those systems typically concern the game world. However, that doesn’t mean they will only look at designer-created content. If an enemy fleet with a particular makeup has been assembled, an explorer would just love to be able to probe it in order to find its strengths and weaknesses, as an exploratory exercise. They would probably feel very satisfied in seeing their ideas turned into action that led to the defeat of the fleet – not because they wanted to win, but because they wanted to be proved right.

I don’t, therefore, see a contradiction here.

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

Same as any other field: talent and luck.

Richard

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

Second, one of the things I recall from your first (4 suit) paper was that one of the best things you can do to improve the game’s survivability was to increase the explorers, and the worst thing for the game was an increase in killers. If I’ve got that wrong, please correct me. Otherwise,

It seems that since “Killers” includes “Politicians”, which turns into “Guild leader”, it is really “Griefer”, or “Playground bully” that is the nasty game killer. Yes, that’s actually commonly mentioned on game forums, but I can’t think I’ve seen it stated in a formal paper (like yours) before.

Equally, since “Explorer” includes both “Scientist” (an early stage alternative of asking a person/cheat site) and “Hacker” (a late stage alternative to knowing the people you play with), those seem to be the key things to strive for. I’m realizing as I write this that people go to cheat sites because the game is too challenging — the “How do I solve this puzzle” issue. In other words, during the “guided path”/”Dorthy” phase, the game needs to avoid the “tomb of horrors” level of challenge on the main path, and actually give you challenges that are solvable. Nor does it make sense to give harder challenges that are worth more points — people will just get the answers from cheat sites. There has to be enough clues/information/details in-game to make cheat sites pointless. The game world itself needs to be understandable from the game. (That doesn’t mean “No hard challenges”; it means “Hard challenges don’t get special rewards)

And, at the end-game, you then need to make the game world itself the “point of study”, rather than allowing the other players to be what is studied. Again, this gets back to being able to know the game world.

In between, we need to encourage planners. As you point out, the third box on the top line is where other players recognize you as being good, while the third box on the bottom line is where the game world recognizes you as being good; only that (3 bottom) leads to the end-goal of “Hackers”.

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? As much as you say that this is where history is made, where designed content can not be made fast enough to keep interest up (which are both good points), how do you keep the people who lose from being so devastated that they cannot keep competing with loss after loss? Blood Bowl (I was serious about that in my last post) came up with an incentive/handicapping system to give underdogs in fights a significant advantage so that they would not be hopelessly outgunned. WoW, as I understand it, has nothing at all (but the cost of a loss is trivial). Eve, on the other hand, as I understand it has no handicapping and horrific costs of losing (ships get expensive).

How do you keep the griefers/playground bullies/gankers from dominating as you leave the guided track? If you need to have something recognize success (stage 3), and that is either going to be the game, or the other players, once you leave the track, what is there for the game to reward, besides kills and possessions? And if the game world truly becomes “neutral”, how do you encourage the bottom row for stage 3 and 4?

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.

So the simple question: Am I misunderstanding something, or have I hit the nail in the crack?

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