The World of Tanks way works pretty well for this, up to a point anyway.
It is free to play, you gain xp and credits through performance in game, and grind your way up the tech tree.
You can however, pay real money for gold. This can be used to upgrade your account to premium (extra 50% xp and credits earned per battle) for a fixed period or converted to xp/credits. Gold can also be used to buy premium vehicles, these get an increased rate of credit earning, but are not as good stats-wise as a same tier vehicle obtained by grinding properly.
It does not become 'pay to win' as all you get is a slightly faster grind by paying money.
On the flip side of this, the high fantasy genre has had the concept of leveling ever since Gary Gygax put the idea of Elves and Dwarves running around in to the concept of a "co-operative war game where you control 1 model on the board". It is part of the appeal of the genre, so I am not sure I can completely agree when you have an online game in that context - but I do see and understand your point totally.
It will be interesting to see how GW2's PvP (organised, there is 'world' PvP which will allow for imbalances) will turn out. No leveling, equal gear, buy once no sub.
Leveling in its current state is bad, and not just in terms of PvP. It means that I can't jump in and play with my friends, because of outleveling or outgearing each other at the level cap. Progress doesn't have to be about gear stats or vertical leveling. I'm sure someone can come up with more interesting and accessible ways of progressing. There is *far* too much devotion to excluding and restricting, rather than enabling, in general.
Exploring a new 'world' is a significant factor contributing to my interest in MMORPGs. Excessive re-use of models, completely obvious zone borders, uniform mob placement and the general staticness of the world detracts from the fun.
I haven't played any non-RPG MMOs, so I can't comment on those. In general, the MMO part makes the environment feel that much more alive, even when one doesn't have one hundred friends in-game.
Ah, whatever happened to 'kill once and move on'..
It is a very interesting debate, but I think I have an idea I want to run past you - particularly those on the cynical side of the increased power debate regarding the current state of online games.
What if the game granted you a reward for completion of tasks which improved the power of your character, but that reward was not permanent. This could take several forms, be it weapons and armour that wear out, or potions and scrolls that are disposable?
This way a player is rewarded, but their achievement does not extend them in power in any permanent way such that friends cannot play together.
If all players who have completed the basic training quests are essentially the same level, or at most in a narrow band of power and abilities then this allows friends to play together regardless of level and rewards, whilst meaningful, on the whole grant no permanent or exaggerated power enhancement to characters over their friends.
Don't know about you but I was doing hotlaps on Mario Kart on the SNES and trying to do Sonic levels quicker than anyone else.
Still was good fun, but we're humans, we play and we get good at something.
If a game has 'learnable' (? real word) & repetitive elements people will get better. If you take away a basic human function of learning and improving, then why would anyone continue playing. and playing a basic function of learning. To play is to learn is to improve.
You'd need to introduce a handicap system... and that gets complicated and ther game isn't fair anymore.
The only way to make it pure play if there was no competition and there was a constant flow of original tasks and games that has no transferable skills.
task based games could be interesting. Removing the competitive element for a communal one.
One of the things I'm having hard time understanding is the "earning something" mentality of mmorpgs. Be it experience levels like in most games, new tanks like in world of tanks or just license levels like in iracing. There is this forced sense of achievement or salary in other terms. Something you work towards. Not having fun getting there but having fun finally having it. In its most basic form it is just endless grinding but often times it is just put there as some kind of goal everybody must work towards.
I don't have problem grinding in the sense that you need to gain something by doing something as long as it isn't mindless repetitive grinding. But the goal of the game should not be about working towards goals but about the path you take to get there. Many games have taken the totally opposite route. Instead of releasing their games as what they are they add the experience grinding aspect on top of it just because everyone else has it too. Like GT5. You need to earrrrrrn your right to the end levels.
It is kind of strange how deeply ingrained the whole idea of earning and leveling is with online games in general. Nobody likes to work in real life in the sense that we enjoy every moment of it. But in games and in online games especially it is considered a must feature of the game. Literally working to achieve something.
One of the things I read while back was that piece of text that was accidentally released by some google employee. It was about how amazon and facebook understand what makes their businesses work while google doesn't. Platforms. It is basically allowing the users (and other shady businesses too) to create content for your site or sites. Instead of facebook being just a big irc&twitter site it is a social media site where the content is not made by facebook. Facebook just creates a platform for the content to exist and the content comes from everywhere else.
Imho a good online game could or should be like a platform. Something you build, shape and torn down as you go as player. Something that can be used for different purposes instead of having just one single purpose. Facebook is not all about being connected but it has lots of stuff that have made it to be this time sink for lots of relatively normal people.
Of course leveling itself is an easy tool to add goals to the game. Instead of doing the same thing trillion times you can now do it trillion times and get newer stuff to do the same stuff again trillion times to get newer stuff again. But it is kind of sad that every online game now thinks it needs leveling, experience and all that grindy stuff. It almost feels like giving the players all the tools, gadgets and game aspects from the start is like a dogma. What's there to do when you can get the best stuffs from beginning and beat the game in 5 minutes?
Maybe that is just one of the basic dogmas of online games no one dares to break? To have goals of the game to have users earn them as much as have time for..?
I think there is nothing wrong with the concept, but an aweful lot is wrong with the current implementations. Too many games have made grind a key element in saving on the creation of new content, and the grind content just isn't interesting or challenging enough.
As a lone developer I am no better equipped to produce infinite content than anyone else, so clearly content will have to be repeated - but I think the key is to get rid of the grind content completely, and make the content that gets repeated interesting and varied as much as possible.
On this I completely agree with you. The key word here is "grind". There is no issue with repeating content - I have raced South City Classic more times than I have cooked an edible meal, but the experience wasn't soulless and empty of reward.
I think it was the easy thing to do, the genre started with high fantasy games and the precedent existed long before computer games got involved for characters to progress as part of their personal story. When EA got involved and produced Everquest (under the Verant studio which they owned) they siezed this aspect and used it as the mechanism of the game. It meant they had to produce less content, and less content makes a game cheaper to develop.
I'll break it . I am lucky/sad enough to have enjoyed raiding back in the early days of MMO and I think that's an experience that more people should be able to enjoy.
Where is the challenge for me? Hobbies are meant to be fun, so I like to do new stuff.
I couldn't agree more.
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I have come up with another mechanism for monetising a game, the earlier idea (I still wouldnt mind feedback on that btw) was for players to pre-pay to an account and then deduct funds for time spent active playing premium content - but general game access and some content to be free. No monthly costs, and you get the full value of the money you have paid.
Another idea is to make the game entirely free, but instead of getting loot at the end of a quest, the best stuff you get a piece from a recipe, to complete the recipe you must buy some part of it with actual money in a web shop. This allows players to enjoy the full game for free, but to get the best gear you must both earn it by completing raids in gameplay, and then pay to get the rest of the bits you need for the recipe.
I think the latter idea is a better model, but I also want the rewards in the game to be temporary and wear out to keep a more level playing field, and I am cautious of the appeal of the best gear being something you pay for and then loose a month or so down the line. It doesn't work quite so well in a game that addresses all the other issues raised in this discussion - but the former idea restricts content in the game to paying customers only.
Yeah but Dungeons & Dragons is a co-operative game where everybody's character improves at pretty much the same rate, and the 'Dungeon Master' can generate opponents to suit. When you've got players taking on other players this mechanic doesn't improve the gameplay experience, it destroys it.
The number one reason grind gets put into MUMORPUGERs is Skinner's Box. You're coniditioned to enjoy meaningless (in the grand scheme of things) numbers go up constantly while you play to keep you as a paying customer for all eternity; ideally (for the publisher) anyway. The problem is finding the right balance between sufficient gratification while making progress as slow as possible.
Basically achievements use the same principle to keep you playing.
And here's some relevant viewing to keep you from treating your players like pigeons: http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/the-skinner-box
If you must make a MUMORPUGER (and you should not but I will get to that in the end of this post) the trick is to be able to tell the story of the game not through cutscenes and endless textboxes of narrative but through play and and the world around you. The way the world reacts to your behaviour as a player and the situations your thrown into can contain a ton of good narative without explicitly telling it. However that is probably way beyond the scope of what a single person (which I'm getting the vibe you are in this project) can concievably pull of well.
I think the best way to do this is some kind of ladder and matchmaking system where your pitted against player of equal skill combined with a game that isn't build around persitant leveling. I.e. the only advantage a player with more time in the game has is actual skill not some built in advantage the game itself provides.
The only thing that can break that is diminishing influx of new players. As long as you have a constant rate of newbies picking up your game you will always have players of all skill brackets to pair up with anyone wanting to play the game. If the stream of new players ebbs away you end up with a playerbase that improves in skill constantly to the point where only the most commited new players have any chance of truely enjoying the game at some way off point in their future.
You can get a good sense of what this feels like by trying Quake 3 1v1 or Broodwar today if you have no or little prior experience with either.
Look into League of Legends and all the other free to play games that are cropping up left and right these days. From what I know LOL's only stream of revenue is selling skins for your heroes; i.e. stuff that is entirely cosmetic and yet they seem to be doing just fine in terms of revenue.
Also more relevant videos: http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/microtransactions
MOBAs and Warcraft 3 both have non persistant leveling. If your game absolutely must have this having a level system on a per game basis is the way to go if you ask me.
Or alternatively you should design your system around gaining wider access to the games content and not stronger chracters. A good example of how not to do this is Jumpgate which had lighter ships that you could access at lower levers and heavier ships at higher levels. Conventional space shooter logic would mean that a light ship should be able to compete 1v1 vs a heaver craft if the player is good enough at handling it and can use the greater mobility of his craft to outwith the guy in a heaver ship. The reality in Jumpgate however was that heaver crafts were actually faster than lighter ones and by and large more maneuverable.
This creates two problems:
1) new players are forced to grind until they get to the point where they can actually do anything interesting in the game
2) the gear high level player use will be identical across the board making pvp entirely predictable and boring
The way around this would be to design characters at all levels of play to be inherently balanced as long as the player has the skill to fully utilize their potential. This means the new players will not be locked out of 99% of your game through inherent limitations but through their own. Which is especially important if it is a small indie game that wont have that much of a player base to begin with thus leaving your world deserted from most people point of view.
To quote the video I linked earlier (definitely do watch it!) DO NOT SELL POWER.
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Now for the rant.
First of all especially if you are alone on this don't try to make an MMORPG. It takes a ton of money and time to create enough content for it to keep players interested for more than a few hours on top of building the game itself and the chances of doing it singlehandedly are pretty close to nill. Secondly there is WOW, everyone who wants to play an MMORPG already plays WOW, it has effectively destroyed the market, there is no realistic chance of breaking into that. More well funded projects have tried and failed several times.
Secondly make something that is genuinely original. Whatever idea there is that has already been done before there are several better funded projects already doing it. Whether it is WOW, LOL and DOTA 2, Starcraft, iRacing any of the classic and relatively new genres has huge players already in it that are nigh on impossible to compete with unless you have at least some sort of gimmick they don't.
Thirdly I would advise you to make something based around insular instances of the same game that the player will play repeatedly, think any kind of traditional game where the state of the game gets reset after each instance of the game has ended (e.g. racing games where the gamestate resets at the end of the race or tetris where the game starts over after one player is eliminated). It keeps the amound of content you have to create at a realistically attainable degree and allows you to tack on content as you go along. Perhaps even to weave every game into a surrounding narrative at a later stage of the development where e.g. each game of a MOBA is a single battle of some greater war going on in the world.
Well one easy way to make a game with tons of content is to just create a "top layer game" that uses other games to do the action part. Like combine fifa 2012 and some football manager game and create your own game that somehow combines those two into one. Or F1 2011 and and some F1 manager game.
You could even combine lfs and skyrim and create the first middle ages era realistic magical racing simulator. Qualifying is done in skyrim and races in lfs.
Thanks for the links Shotglass, very interesting and I see your point on selling power. I will watch them through a few times before concluding my game design.
Regarding the speech on doing an MMO, I have to bring you back to the point of why I am doing this.
It is not business: I have one of those already.
My hobby for many years was making games. I've released so many that nowadays I can only guess at the number knowing it would be wildly inaccurate, but over the 3 decades that I have been coding computer games it is possible that I have released over 100 games. Most of them small and simple, and typically quite playable with reasonable graphics by indi standards.
Since becoming a professional developer about 4 years ago I have not coded any games, my last gaming project was the CTRA. And when you consider what the CTRA was, essentially, it was a form of MMO. So this isn't new territory for me.
Recently I rediscovered my passion for making games, I have somehow managed to separate out the programming I do at work from the programming I do on my hobby.
And lastly, my day job is reasonable, and my part time business is nicely profitable, so I can afford to purchase assets and spend money on my hobby.
I know the bubble has burst on MMO's, but it is something I have always wanted to do - and this project isnt about money, it is about having fun and enjoying this brilliant hobby for what it is - awesome fun.
I knew I could not write an MMO before because I couldn't afford the art asset. I feel that I am in a position now that I can acquire enough art assets to make an MMO game possible for me to develop, and I am not remotely daunted by the network side of things.
So for me the time is right for me to create a high fantasy MMO. After all, I already did it for motor sports - and high fantasy is my other big interest.
I realize that this isn't a business and wasn't thinking in sales . I was thinking that it would be rather frustrating to put a lot of hours into a hobby that people will maybe play for a few days before they go back to playing their main MMO.
Indie development both monetary based and freeware is grounded in being different from the mainstream and trying ideas that big publishers would never greenlight for being too far out of the box. In the same vein though thats also the only way those games can ever stand out against the blinding background of triple A titles and be seen recognized and played in the first place.
It is a very rare occurence for a small game like Counter Strike to make a splash against titles like Q3 or UT and I doubt there currently is a market tougher to break into than MMORPGS.
Yeah it is kinda late to be getting on the MMO bandwagon, but I wasnt in position to try it sooner. And I am finding myself writing in this thread like it is a done decision, it isn't. I'll knock up a design and a prototype - and once the prototype is done I will decide if it's a goer.
I just completed a prototype for a previous project, and sadly what I realised after completing the prototype was that the atmosphere area was too small and to make it bigger I needed larger planets, so the gameplay concept I had in mind would not have worked. I could have worked on making it prettier, but the gameplay wouldnt have happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jrl9874i4lg
I have a fairly well considered gameplay concept for the MMO now - some of it inspired by the discussion in this thread, but I am unsure on monetisation (not out to make a profit, but would like to cover running costs) - and as I said before and your videos confirmed, monetisation needs to be considered at this stage and not just bolted on later in order to get it right.
I remain sceptical that microtransaction cosmetic enhancements will work on an indie game. I, in agreement with your videos, do not want to withhold content but if I do take that model I will at least not make it subscription but based upon active time in premium content - but the not selling power debate is interesting. I hadnt seen my earlier idea as selling power - you had to earn the reward and then make a microtransaction, but the video raised a valid perspective.
In other words, I am still not sure what to do about that aspect and will probably be thinking about it in bed tonight!
Definitely a game that forces gamers to interact with each other for a better chance at winning ( Left 4 Dead and CS ), Immersive gameplay and decent amount of players to a server ( BF3 ), and most importantly to me, a well organized leaderboard for comparable stats and etc.
Well for me its going to be high fantasy, I have sketched out 11 adventures so far, each designed for 80 -120 players and designed to last about 2 hours and mostly based upon media I already have in my library of assets so it should be achievable.
There's little in the way of progression (no grind, no levelling), instead rewards are better gear - but better gear will not give a substantial improvement in ability. Add that on top of a small amount of solo skills testing content and a pvp sub-game, and I think that will be a good basis from which to start.
In terms of monetisation, my best idea so far is a slight variation on what I mentioned earlier. Some rewards in the game will be recipe pieces, to complete the recipe will take some traditional style solo or small group questing (dare I say it, grind). You can circumvent this grind with an in-game microtransaction to complete the recipe from the shop which will sell the recipe pieces otherwise available in the grind content. Remeber there is no other direct benefit from the grind, no levelling, no xp, just quest loot to complete recipes.
This means rewards are earned, and all I am doing is saving some convenience of doing some deliberately slow and un-challenging content.
Mmm. The solo skills tests will be extremely difficult, only the best players will complete them and there will be some rewards from that. eg: Completing a warrior skill test will allow the player to have slightly better warriors, doing the second stage might give their warriors a permanent piece of armour that does not get damaged, doing the third and final test might award them a title so that other players know how good they are.
The PvP will allow you to loot from players you have killed.
The raids will be where all the loot is won, and the best loot completed in the grind area/shop.
That's the basic premise, and I think addresses most of the issues with the best balance I can hope to achieve in the discussion that we've had here.
I think the actual definition is that the game forces people to interact and play as a group as much as possible without telling the player or constantly harassing player about it.
Most people suck in games and the minority of the users of any game are good at it and if you want to create an environment where playing as a group instead of alone is the way to go you need to design the game in such manner that everyone without them even acknowledging it do their part. Team play with strangers is at best randomly done individual decisions that just hapen to overlap with positive or negative final outcome. Imho of course.
Anyways here is the piece of the google employee about platforms: https://plus.google.com/112678 ... 1889851/posts/eVeouesvaVX
Just in case anyone wants to read. Personally I found it very good read and I know as much about programming as a deer knows about playstations.
To me platform game sounds an awesome idea though. (Not platformers which is a different thing altogether!) Which is probably why it isn't done properly yet. Not that it has not been tried before. The psn home or whatever it is called - the thing that you can install on your ps3 and walk around various places, visit stores and such is essentially a platform game where sony only provides the scenery and basic gameplay and then the 3rd party programs create the parts where the action happens (and where money is spent).
Sadly I think the actual workings of it are totally wrong. No one wants to walk around in the same environment in game without doing anything. No one wants to just go for a walk in a game. But the game is built on that idea that some people would actually do that... Basically psn home is like facebook where you walk around like in tomb raider while randomly meeting different people and spend time in virtual mall or museums or whatever. That's stupid and restrictive way to do it. And unnatural. No wonder it's useless: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GukANAtFFfM
Done better there is imho huge potential.
. I am lucky/sad enough to have enjoyed raiding back in the early days of MMO and I think that's an experience that more people should be able to enjoy.