Chapter 6: History, World Building, and Immersion

Creating a MMORPGs is one part game building, one part community building, and one part world building. That final aspect, world building, has gotten a lot of attention over the years and one of the biggest topics of discussion is how much the players should be allowed to affect the world.

Players naturally break things, sometimes maliciously, but often not. There have been raging arguments about what's appropriate in the fiction. This race or faction would never do this or that. Or players shouldn't be allowed to do something because of "The Lore".

The term Lore is a somewhat nebulous concept that is often attached to the entirety of the back story, fiction, and flavor based game design of an MMO. It's a concept that is all inclusive of anything which reflects an MMORPG as a virtual world rather than an online game.

The question, however, is whether this Lore is even important at all. Gaffney and Long had some very interesting things to say about how they view game histories when listening to pitches:

Gaffney: "I've sat through a million pitches go on about the Arch-Duke Zander and his empire five-hundred years ago and how this ties into now. That level of complexity just doesn't mater if you can show me basic fun game mechanics."

Long: "You know things that people usually think are really important, like the real elaborate fiction and storyline, are almost irrelevant to us compared to all the other things Jeremy has mentioned. Like game mechanics and technology, and yeah, it's nice if you have a good story, but for us that's much less important."

Gaffney: "In part because the player's going to write the interesting part of the story. Who cares about ancient history when you have history being made daily?

They make a very compelling point. The real story of a MMOG is made everyday by the people in it. So the question becomes this: Do we need Lore at all? Sage puts things in perspective:

"People hate to read, number one. It's just a true statement. 90% of people also - and that's a made up number of course - are happy that the escape key is there. There is the hardcore group of people who love fiction and love the world environment. And the world environment is important, the setting, the place that people are, that's important to get right. But the stories you try to tell them, again, just what Jeremy said and I'm a full believer in, is that the emergent story of what the player did in the game is far more important than anything the developers try to tell you about what happened between these two things.

If there's too much of it, it's just going to be fiction getting in the way of people having fun and they're just going to want to push the escape key and get away from it. We really want to get to them playing and interacting in the world."

As Sage says, "the world environment is important." There's a reason there hasn't been a successful MMOG with zero, or basically zero, back story. It may work for an FPS but it just doesn't work for an MMOG. You need a compelling world. That's part of the charm of these games: the virtual world people can allow themselves to be absorbed in. This is one of the compelling dynamics that other genres cannot offer and are a major factor in player retention. Lore is important.

But players are more important. The goal, the target, the holy grail perhaps, is to create a world that the player is immersed in but where their stories are the focus. This means you have to strike a delicate balance, made more delicate still because you're catering to the likes of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people. This balance must set a stage for the player while leaving them the main characters.

The danger is that if the player is not the focus the Lore gets in the way of the player playing the game and, by extension, having fun. However it is the environment that makes entering the world compelling. It provides consistency and is a mark of value. Without a well crafted world for the player to exist in your MMOG is just another game and you've missed out on one of the major selling points of the product. As in all things, it is the balance which is important. And as the genre grows and generations pass that balance will become more and more polished as it is a key aspect of the genre.

Chapter 7: The Spoken Word: Voice in Online Gaming

Technology is not particularly the focus of this article. However, one evolving technology is likely to become very important through the next generation and is already having a strong impact through third-party applications among the hardcore audiences. This technology: voice communication.

It is, perhaps, the one technology which has not really been addressed by any of the games that have come out in the First or Second Generations but which will have to be approached, one way or another in the Third.

Long: "It's working really well for Xbox live. And I firmly believe that that is the reason why Xbox Live has been more successful than any other online console service to date is because of voice. You talk about people hate to read, well if you rate "hate to read" one to ten and ten they hate it the most I'd put hate to read around five and hate to type around twenty.

Your average consumer, one, doesn't know how to type and, two, they don't want to. So I think what's going to end up happening if we want to appeal to broader audiences is we're going to have to use voice chat. I think you're going to have to have some kind of combination of text and voice chat, at least some sort of complex voice emote system. But it's going to have to be voice."

Gaffney: "An emote system might be a good system. Toontown did some good stuff with that. But my first reaction is: It's going to push our demographic up. Mom does not want her kid, sitting in the living room, chatting on a headset with some strange guy over the internet. It's just that simple.

With text you can at least record it better and filter it or whatever and you have none of that in voice. In fact it's very tough to even figure out how to mute people in voice. I play Counter-Strike all the time. I have to hit ninety-eight keys to figure out how to do it each time. I think these are the things that are going to have to improve, otherwise it's going to push our age demographic higher.

But it's such a key feature in really coordinating a combat and the most fun, I would argue, in MMPs to date is coordinating the combat. There's really no other game style you do that in except some of the shooters, which are the more niche shooters, and it's fun. Working as a team is fun. I love it when a plan comes together."

Long: "The reality is, whether we want to or not, or whether we think its technically feasible, people are doing it anyway. If the game doesn't support it they're doing it with third party tools. So why not include it because it's going to happen anyway?

Gaffney: "I think most games with voice chat don't do it as well as Teamspeak and so Teamspeak isn't going to be run out of the industry any time soon. In PC games Teamspeak has very little competition."

Weil: "Well DAoC and Ultima Online both said 'We're not even going to bother.' Everybody uses Teamspeak anyway so we're not going to bother.

Long: "Yeah, except, the problem is, again, if we're talking about expanding our market then your average consumer has no knowledge or ability to use a third party program. So I agree that for a power user, such as you and myself, Teamspeak is ideal. But for Joe Consumer it's the whole argument, 'Well we don't even need text chat in our games because there's IRC. So we should model it after IRC'. Again, IRC works great for us but for Joe Consumer…"

Weil "Ship them the earphones and tell 'em where to plug 'em in and there you go."

Long: "That's why Xbox Live is so successful."

Given: MMORPGs, at their heart, are about communication. Given: The spoken word is easier than text. The trend is already visible among the hardcore players in MMOGs and even the more casual Xbox Live players. Voice is the future. But it's difficult. Perhaps it will be a middle-ware solution that wins out. Perhaps the solution is in game design. Perhaps the solution is simply evolving the game technology itself.

But whatever it may be a developer should consider this an opportunity. Voice is one of the major open doors for innovation in the next generation and whoever tackles it well will do well in turn.

Chapter 8: Beta Testing, Millions Served

One of the unique features of MMO games, thanks to the Massively Multiplayer aspect, is the large scale beta test. In your average game, beta is a simple, internal, process of bug testing. But MMOGs are so large that you need to hit a certain critical mass of users to have any hope of finding even the majority of your bugs and balance issues.

The catch, of course, is that this critical mass is far too large to employ internally: somewhere on the order of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of testers when the time comes for load testing.

So how does one hope to manage such an endeavor? How do you get your game tested without giving your game away? Long broke it down into three major questions:

Long: "The real trick to your beta test is 'How Long' and 'How Many People' and 'At What Point In Development Do You Start'.

The pros and cons: Because if you do it too long you run the danger of a large segment of your potential consumer base consuming all the content. And you run the risk that when you start charging people go, 'Well, I'm done, you gave it all to me free, so why should I pay you now?' But that's balanced with the fact that you absolutely have to get them in there to test the stuff because there's a critical mass in these kinds of games that are required to work out all the kinks, to find all the problems.

But then there's a whole other layer to it about how do you incentivize people to tell you about those problems? There's an incentive for them to tell you about bugs that involve stability, but there's not necessarily an incentive for your beta testers to tell you about bugs that are exploits or are balancing issues if they can exploit them to their advantage. And so in almost every single game there's a group of people who find exploit bugs and keep them to themselves until we find out on our own or someone rats them out.

I don't think as an industry we have a really good answer yet on any of these questions: 'How long?', 'How many people?', and 'How do you incentivize people to tell you about the problems?' And so I will gladly pay ten million dollars to the first person who has all these answers nailed."

Weil: "And I don't think you'll get any consensus that there's a right way to do it."

Sage: "That's right, because I think the beta test is directly related to the game and there's no good thing about these are the rules for a beta test. It's all about the game itself. And certain games will have things that work for them."

All of Long's points are critical. But it seems that the most critical one a developer must have a good answer for before the test even starts is the last. MMOGs have had little problem finding people to test their games. People line up for it. The latter though is a huge problem because all these people are volunteers. You are not their primary interest, they are. As a tester in a traditional game it's your job to find these bugs and report them. There's a paycheck waiting for you as incentive to do this. But beta testers, in the online sense, lack this incentive and exist on such an enormous scale that you obvious can't just pay for it. So what do you do?

The first decision is positive or negative reinforcement (or both). Will you give your testers some sort of bonus if they report a bug? Typically this would be an in game bonus. The advantage here is that, suddenly, it's in a player's best interest to report a bug. They get something out of it that is, to them, tangible. Of course there are flaws. What if, for example, the bug allows them to duplicate in-game currency? Suddenly they have an infinite source of cash. Now say your reward is in-game currency. Why would the player report the bug? They can report the bug and gain a finite reward or abuse it and receive an infinite reward.

Some of the most successful rewards seem to be things that are exclusively created for reward purposes. Things like giving the player's character's titles or special items, or things of that nature. The danger is that either other people will scream about favoritism or they will become desperate to get the rewards themselves and will bombard you with hundreds if not thousands of irrelevant bug reports, making the whole process much more difficult from a development end.

Negative reinforcement hopes to intimidate the player-base into reporting bugs. The typical response is to ban, or at least suspend, accounts where the developer finds a player that has been aware of a bug and willfully failed to report it (and, typically, abused it themselves). The hope is that players will value their ability to play the game and thus will report bugs they find so that they don't risk losing that privilege.

The problem here, however, is that there will always be those who will take the risk and abuse bugs anyway. Still more will just quietly save bugs and hope that they're still there when you release. If you are too easy on these people then more will follow in their footsteps. They'll rationalize, "Oh, well those people abused a huge exploit and only got a slap on the wrist. They'd never ban me." Conversely, if you are too aggressive then your testing community may begin to feel oppressed and either begin to generate a negative buzz about your game or even, in a worst case scenario, begin to do things that are directly harmful to the testing process.

It is possible that the best method lies somewhere in-between. However, as Paul Sage pointed out, every beta test is different. There's no clearly right answer as it depends entirely on the mechanics of the game, the goals of testing, and the community in question.

As for the other questions, Gaffney, Freese, and Weil addressed Long's question of "How long" in a little more detail:

Freese: "I think I would distinguish between what I would call open beta, which is beta testing, and the time before that alpha testing. I think the way it should be done is a much longer period of closed testing with a smaller group of testers which really is designed to work out the bugs in the game. The open period, where you basically let a large number of people into your game at once, should be fairly short and your intent there is not to find bugs in the game or problems in your game design; hopefully you've solved those problems before now. You're really testing your ability to run the service: Your server load, your ability to respond to customer complaints, etc. You're also generating buzz on the game. If this period is too long, as Starr said, you can have players consume all your content."

Gaffney: "I think it's interesting that WoW's had such a long test period and we'll see. Regardless of whether people who buy WoW will play it for three months or six or twelve it'll be shorter if they got a bunch of those months for free unless it's just going to keep them forever.

The problem with the short open beta is you just need to have, as a company, the balls that if you do find big issues in that short open beta to shut the beta down and go fix them and then have another beta instead of extending beta while you try to fix them."

Weil: "I don't know if my perception matches reality at all but I thought that the way City of Heroes did their late stages of beta was a good one. You know, we're going to turn on the game for forty-eight hours. Everyone slams it and plays for forty-eight hours. Ok, we're turning it off. And they turn it off. And so the emphasis is getting the data, analyzing the data, and fixing the problems rather than 'we gotta keep it up, we gotta keep it up' so we have to keep the servers up the whole time. A lot of man power goes into that."

There seems to be a consensus that testing-wise and retention-wise the shorter the better. Of course, taken to the extreme, this is a zero-sum equation. The best result would be to have no beta at all. This is balanced then, as Long pointed out, by the need to actually test the game under conditions that you cannot arrive at internally.

The point, then, is not that there is one right way but just the opposite. A company has a lot to gain by finding the perfect solution for the game they're making, be it tried and true or totally revolutionary. There's a lot of wiggle room and success breeds not only a better game but also is one of the major pieces of marketing and buzz that will accompany your game into launch and beyond. Sometimes even significantly beyond.

There is a further consideration of what types of players you allow into your test. Beyond the obviously negative elements who simply exist to cause grief either for your other players or for you as a developer there are two types of players who can actually harm the development process through their divergent interests.

The first is the "fanboy" mentality. This is the type of the player who is, for one reason or another, absolutely sold on the game and who is absolutely convinced that this game will be the best game since sliced bread. While they can be good for hype, they can also have a serious negative impact upon the game's testing community. Quite often they feel the need to defend the game, and, by extension, their love for it, and will actively debate or, more likely, attack those testers who are making comments about negative aspects of the game. While some of those comments may be off base the important point is that they can prevent useful information from ever reaching the developer's ears. It's pretty easy for them to create such a cloudy signal to noise ratio that actual useful messages are lost in the clutter.

Gaffney mentioned one of the more interesting types of "fanboys":

"There's a group of players who are always like, 'Oh, they're going to shut the servers down three days before launch and that's when they're going to add in all the stuff I want.' But they're not. The game you saw three days before is going to be the game you see when they launch it. They say that if it's a month, they'll say it if it's three days, and nothing changes in that last period of time, you've got the same damn game."

The other type of potential negative tester is a very interesting development that is only now beginning to become apparent as the concept of beta testing and MMOGs age. The very social structures these games work to foster have grown a… mutant strain of player if you will. Gaffney elaborates:

"A big issue is that there's a large group of players, who go from beta to beta to beta, because they're not paying for games. Because you always stick in your second game less than your first, you always stick in your third less than your second, that's been a pretty continuous trend. You know a lot of the games that ship now are better quality games than Everquest was back in the day but someone who stuck with Everquest for four years might play their next game for six months before they move on because their Everquest experience counts towards their burnout cycle on their next game. Because of that I think we're seeing a lot higher turn over rate.

There's a crowd of gypsies right now moving from game to game to game who have all these hardcore opinions formed from their early things. Bartle did a really interesting article on this, and because they're in the betas and they're vocal they're setting the trends for a lot of these games and they're limiting innovation too."

This player type is very experienced. So experienced in fact that they have totally lost all resemblance to the player you're trying to reach. Simply put the players who have evolved to this point are not really customers anymore. So are these players worth having around at all?

Well, like everything else, that depends. There are dangers in allowing these types of players into your game. You're getting skewed reporting and input that's going to be irrelevant or even counter to the goals of 95+% of your player base. On the other hand the information you can garnish from how these highly experienced and organized groups can attack your game and your content can be invaluable.

The moral is simply to understand who you're letting in the door and monitor them appropriately. The biggest danger is that most developers are hardcore players themselves. It's easy to hear the praise of this ultra-hardcore audience and think you're on the right path because you like it too. It's what you want to hear. But this is the road to hubris because Joe Consumer is not hardcore. He has an entirely different set of needs than the hardcore minority and, ideally, you need to balance your game design to fit both as much as possible.

Conclusion