MMO Gaming

Why did no one tell me that my last post sounded like a half-drunken tirade? Did no one notice that my grammar was poor and my sentences barely intelligible? This is the kind of thing I need to be reminded. In the future, if I write a half-sentence like this, where my thought is not even finished, please let me know.

The post is not inaccurate in any particular way but because the very idea seems almost too possible.

I didn’t come on here just to humiliate myself though, I have a reason. I’ve been thinking. Much like my half-sentence above, I only wish I was a heavy drinker so that I could pass the blame onto something other than my own demented musings (often coming to me under the soft glow of the monitor while coding.)

I think I’ve mentioned it before, but maybe I haven’t. Maybe it is one of those ideas which I’ve had for so long that I can not remember whether I have ever uttered it to another human being or not. Like I said though, I think I have. I’ve just been thinking more about it recently.

Environments. Preferably destructible. I’m not talking fully destructible. I’m not asking for some sort of Red Faction-esque blowing through walls, just a little something to let me know that the environment is more than just some art stuck on the screen. Oh…I mean art with collision detection of course.

Look at the typical MMOG. Whatever form of “magic” they have (whether mystical or technological in nature) usually falls under the elemental kind, Fire, Water/Ice, Wind, etc. Everyone is pretty much familiar with this. My question is, why are environments, made out of many materials, just sitting there no matter what type of attack hits them.

Let me give an example. Let’s say we are talking about a boat made out of wooden planks. Why can’t the game determine a few things about the boat to make the environment more interactive. First, why doesn’t each “section” of said boat have some sort of “health” bar. In essence, rather than creating one model for “boat” why not create multiple pieces of the same model that fit together like puzzle pieces, to make up the boat (bow, stern, mast…um…that pretty much exhausts my knowledge of boats to be honest.) Then, depending on the material it is fashioned out of (in this case wood) it reacts differently to external player effects.

Shooting fire at the wood boat would make it light up, gradually damaging the hull and spreading, eventually hurting those on the boat if they were in the area of the fire. Or perhaps wind tears the wooden planks off the boat, making them act as projectiles which can hit and do damage not only to the rest of the structure of the boat, but to human and computer-controlled characters.

Perhaps you have a metal boat where “fire” damage caused the boat to become extremely hot and cause constant searing damage which gradually drains the HP of those in contact with it. Or maybe you use ice on the metal boat causing it to become very slick, increasing the chances of knockdown effects and causing slow to everyone in the affected area.

I’m not talking merely about AoE damaging moves, I’m talking about a really dynamic environment. No, it doesn’t have to be completely dynamic, but more than just a static world to look at would be nice. Not every little thing has to be a part of it, but some things certainly could be. When are we going to see it happen?

mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming, game design, mmo design, mmo environments, game environments, world design, game worlds

There was a post over on MMOCrunch.com that got me thinking. The post is not inaccurate in any particular way but because the very idea seems almost too possible.

To put it simply, if the single-player RPG experience is going to be dwindling and all we will be left with is everything coming out as an MMOG than there are some serious problems that need to be dealt with, all of which are well known.

First of all, story. MMOs are the only games I can think of that can literally get by on zero story. I know, someone is probably already yelling at their screens wishing to tell me all about quests and how there is more story in an MMO than in any other type of game. That’s bullshit. There, I said it. Killing 500 Wazzits because they are eating all the dingleberries is not a story. Let’s please try to keep our delusions of grandeur to a reasonable level here.

I play RPGs (of the non-MMO variety) mostly because of the story. It’s why I have sat, and continue to sit through hundreds of hours worth of turn-based or “active time battle” battle systems, not to mention random battles of the console RPG. These systems of combat aren’t particularly enjoying or exciting, but they get the job done and let me enjoy what I’m really there for, the story and how it unfolds. Until MMOs can come anywhere close to that I fear for the death of the single-player RPG.

Another thing that is seemingly overlooked is immersion. I know, I know, MMOs are constantly working on this, but in the single player RPG things are so much better defined. What I do matters, I really take part in the goings on in the world. The MMO has not been able to capture that same feeling.

Not to say, of course, that MMOs don’t have the ability to, or that they do not do many other things that the single-player experience can not (and does not try to) match, but these integral things, like story and immersion, must be taken care of. More on this tomorrow.

I mentioned this briefly before. Talked about only for a moment and in the more strict relation to newcomers to (MMO) gaming. Still, with recent talk of raid interfaces I am forced to re-look at where I stand on the issue.

For the record, I stand exactly where I did in that post. Too much information is given all the time that is unnecessary. And, in fact, this information may not be helping people raid better, it may in fact make it harder.

I am always appalled by most people’s raiding screenshots, even my own from my time spent in WoW. I’ve got crap all over the place. Don’t get me wrong, I believed that I needed all that crap to be effective, but the truth is, I probably didn’t. I’ve played both a healer and a tank in raids, as both I had every group open to me all the time so I could monitor health. Pretty much every raiding person does that. But why?

I mean, who actually needs to do that? Why does a hunter need to know the exact health of every raid member? What is he going to do with that information? Bandage? It seems silly. So much clutter for so little payoff. I’d argue a good fifty percent of the information we surround ourselves with is something we can’t help out with anyway. And, on the off chance there is something we could help with how often do we miss it because of the huge amount of information we try to show ourselves?

The real problem is no one has spent sufficient time developing an interface that is intuitive enough so that it presents information at the right time. There is only “all information” or “no information” and no in between really. The other problem is the current MMO design paradigm seems to be interface equals boxes on screen. I hate that most of all. The interface I am presented in a game should not be made up entirely of boxes on a screen. The world is my interface.

Don’t get me wrong, boxes on the screen have their place when they need to be there, but they don’t need to be available all the time so why detract from the beautiful world that was built? Use them when they are necessary but don’t just throw them up there in order to stick yet another box on the screen. This does no good for the player or the developer.

I’ll have to talk a bit more about this at a later point in the month, even now I’m noticing some activity in the back of my mind. This can only mean I’m getting an idea. Or my head is going to explode. I guess you’ll have to wait and see if I post tomorrow to find out which it actually is.

mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming, game interface, interface design, game design, raiding

At some point we seem to have entered into some episode right out of the twilight zone. I mean, when a post I make actually manages to then come true I think we can all agree something is decidedly wrong with the universe.

Now, of course, this has been a long time coming, and my own post has nothing to do with what they are going to be doing, per se, but it is rather odd. Perhaps even more odd because I actually ended up writing that post in late March and just set it to post for the April 2. In the spirit of finding out interesting news the day after I post about a similar topic I’d like to encourage whoever has news of the Shadowrun MMO (I repeat Shadowrun MMO, for the love of god let’s get this thing out) please come out and tell us about it. No, seriously. Why the hell isn’t this out yet. Am I going to have to write an entire post dedicated to how perfect the system and settings translate to the MMO space? Am I going to have to write down every design idea I’ve ever had for the game before I get some news?

Microsoft, get on that. Surely you can afford to waste a few million reviving one of the best intellectual property’s ever developed by the human mind. Oh yeah, and when you announce it (tomorrow perhaps?) don’t tell me it’s going to be a pile of shit FPS again. I’d personally come and strangle you all. Dead. Serious.

In game advertisements. Some people find the very notion sickening. Big companies paying out hundreds, thousands, or maybe even millions of dollars to get their ads stuck in our games. And the worst part is, we aren’t seeing any of the benefits. They still charge us fifty or more dollars for the game, and in the case of MMOs, usually a monthly fee of $14.99 as well, and still they stick in ads.

It feels kind of like a slap in the face to know that these companies are pulling in money from every direction possible. Then they have the gall to tell us that making games is expensive, and that extra money from advertising isn’t covering costs. As if it’s our problem that they are in the business of making games. A little hint, don’t bitch about something you choose to do.

If you make games for a living, don’t cry to me about how hard it is. It’s like those parents I hear whining to their own kids about how the kids don’t know how hard it is to be a parent. Well, you know what, the kid didn’t have a choice in it, you did, so suck it up and deal with it.

It’s something I’ve seen far too commonly. The defense by developers is almost always the same, some variation of “Making games is expensive, if you want to continue enjoying the game than we have to make some money off of it. That’s just the business.”

Yeah, we’re all crying because you do something that you enjoy. It really helps the rest of us working in jobs we may or may not like but that we perform anyway because it provides us the necessities. No, go ahead, tell us all about your money problems. We’ve never faced anything like it before. We are all completely business inept. Hold on, let me find a cat for this, he should hammer the point home.

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One day each year every jackass has the wonderful privilege of being given a free ride. Their asshattery is overlooked, perhaps even found amusing. This day is April 1st, perhaps better known as April Fool’s Day.

Coming off like that it probably sounds as if I am cynical about the whole thing. “He’s been fooled one to many times” you are no doubt thinking. You would be wrong. That assumption would be incorrect because on this day I choose to go about my normal schedule, read all the things I normally would, and then dismiss them, the realistic with the ridiculous, because the whole day is a sham.

“On the second,” I swear to myself each year, “I shall wade through the bullshit to pick out the nuggets of truth like so much unchewed corn.” I consider that my April Fool’s prank to myself. I never laugh at it.

It seems to be customary, apparently, to recap the events of the day tomorrow, pointing out to everyone, in case it was not abundantly clear already, just exactly what was a load of horseshit and what was not.

To spit on the spirit of the day I will now say something wholly truthful. In the month of April I will post at least one post every day. Of course, if for some reason this is not the case, will I just say that this was in fact my April Fool’s joke? Or perhaps it is, in fact, my April Fool’s joke and this lead up has all been about setting the proper tone? Unfortunately for both you and I, we shall only discover the answer to that mystery at the end of the month.

Over the past couple of days I’ve noticed several posts in my feed reader covering betas, leaks of information (beta or otherwise privileged information) and even a bit about NDAs and breaking them. I’ll probably reiterate here some of what I said in an earlier post, but that’s okay, the things I said then are just as true now.

First I’d like to address an issue with several posts/comments I’ve read about the topic. I’ll group all these people together and let’s just say that these people believe in the “magic patch theory” of game betas. The “magic patch theory” is something I just made up, feel free to use it as you will. Basically the Magic Patch Theory boils down to the fact that certain people believe that at some point during the beta testing period there will be a patch which completely changes and fixes all the problems of the game.

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Back to this talk of tutorials, or lack thereof. I promised this time to talk a little bit about how WoW relates to other games with tutorials, like Tabula Rasa or City of Heroes/Villains. Before I do that though I want to talk about two other games, briefly, and how they handle tutorials.

First up a little talk about Lord of the Rings Online. I won’t lie and pretend I like the game. I just don’t, and I apologize to all fans of the game, but it just bores me to tears. That said, it does have an interesting introduction to the game. You start off by yourself in a given zone (depending on race chosen at the beginning.) This is the introduction to the game and they have you do the normal set of tutorial “stuff” before moving on.

The next thing you do, though, is not move on into the big open world. You instead move on to a larger, but still contained, area. This area has other players but is not quite the wide open world. This is an interesting approach. It would perhaps be more interesting (and more beneficial) for a game that was heavily focused around PvP, allowing players to get a bit of experience before thrusting them into the open. Either way, it is worth mentioning if only to show another way of handling new user experience in game design.

I also want to talk briefly about EVE and it’s tutorial. The first time I loaded up EVE on the 14 day free trial I didn’t even manage to make it past the tutorial. I had been playing the game for over 3 hours. That, to me, was a huge problem. If in 3 hours I could not finish the tutorial (and, judging by the bar that showed me how far along I was, not even halfway done with it) then I did not care enough to stick through more.

Later, when I purchased EVE for myself (an odd story given my dislike of the 14 day trial, but that is a tale for another time) I found that the tutorial was significantly shortened and simplified. I finished the whole thing in about an hour. They then let me loose to do things on my own. Except, instead of teaching me everything I needed to know to play the game well, they taught me only the basics. New tutorials would pop up as I came across new things or wanted to use new features.

This idea works particularly well in EVE given the amount of depth and difficulty the game has getting into it. Being bombarded with a multi-hour tutorial is annoying, but gradually increasing my knowledge when I am requiring that information is useful. It is a thoughtful balance that was struck.

Now then, on to WoW. If WoW is any indication of how to properly design a game for the masses (and it may or may not be) then having any sort of tutorial area is a waste of good designer time. Why? WoW has no tutorial. What you do at level 1 you continue to do until you hit level 70. You talk to people with the ! marker over there head. You turn in when they have the ? marker above their head. You kill the bad guys to collect whatever it is they want. There is no tutorial (there are the new player pop-ups but I’ll treat that as a separate case.)

The game that needs no tutorial has the most players. WoW haters, and probably several lovers also would point this out as a bad thing. It shows the game is too simple, too easy, and essentially made for the lowest common denominator. I don’t necessarily disagree with any of that stance, but I would have to question whether this is a bad thing or not. Certainly Blizzard, swimming in more money than they could have imagined, doesn’t feel bad about designing a game open for anyone and everyone.

On the other side of the WoW coin though is an issue common to my time in WoW that I have noticed lessened in every other game I played. Group dynamics. In WoW grouping is not so much about finding a group that is good as it is about finding a group that doesn’t suck. In many other games, the fact that there is a learning curve, no matter how slight, means that people better understand how to work together, or at least slow down enough so as not to get themselves and others killed. Many WoW players seem unable to understand this. There is no learning curve to the game and its pick up and play ability makes it extremely fun and also extremely frustrating when dealing with players who are new, or have not taken the time to learn.

As a matter of quality, I guess it is hard to say which is better. From a purely business perspective Blizzard would seem to be the clear choice, but from a design perspective each option has its ups and downs. The question is, will other games be able to see significant success with different methods if WoW-like quality existed?

World of warcraft, wow, game design, tutorials, eve online, lord of the rings online, mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming

I’m not a frequent commenter on the many blogs I read. This is not because I don’t have something to say most of the time, this is more because I have what people may call a “commenting problem.” You see, I am not a happy and healthy individual like most of you. I have a disease. It is, as of now, still unnamed and until I get my medical degree (which, as I understand it, would require me to actually go to medical school) shall remain so.

My problem is quite simple. I can’t just comment and forget. In fact, I can’t just comment now and check back later where I commented to see if there are any responses. I comment and then I get stuck thinking. I think about all the questions I raised, what questions they raise, what questions others may raise, the arguments or disagreements others may have and then formulate responses and answers to all of these things. And then I repeat that process over and over again in my mind for days before curling myself into the fetal position in the corner of my room.

The corner of my room is cold, and I don’t much enjoy it so you can imagine my dismay when I made a comment over at Cameron’s site. Now I am stuck with a partially designed game in my head and I can’t stop thinking about all the other questions and all the other ways to design this game.

I’m just going to throw it down here. Things will probably be disjointed. Then again, if you read here regularly this will probably not come as a shock to you. First a quick rundown of what I said over there, then on to my ideas.

There are plenty of ways in which an MMORTS can be done without balance issues. At some point you have to sacrifice a bit of realism to attain them, perhaps, but then again, if a person is going to complain that much about realism in a game then perhaps they have other more pressing issues they need to attend to.

In relation to limited resources this does not have to be the case. All resources can be unlimited as they are in every MMO I’ve ever played. More specifically these resources would just have to have rarities attached to them so “spawn” rates on rarer nodes are longer/there are less of them.

This would not be unlike the way that Silver veins in WoW are a rare “spawn” of tin veins.

The problem with unlimited resources based on rarity then instantly becomes one of balance. One guild/person can take over a map and simply hog all the resources, no matter how rare they may be he still ends up getting them every time they appear.

This also brings about the “new player problem” in which new players are able to be beaten on by the simply better prepared, longer time players who have built up bases.

Balance is the key here, specifically balance of the resource and “technology” economy. In most RTS games there are levels of “technology” which can be upgraded. That is you can upgrade a level 1 “tower” to a level 2 “outpost” which costs resources but has higher “HP” and does more damage.

In an MMORTS you simply make this technology more freely available to new players over time.

To give an example, let’s assume there is a high end group/guild/person who has built up a strong base and continuously researches the newest technologies. As time passes this technology would simply become part of day to day life not just for the people under control of that kingdom, but for the entire world. This would mean that the resource cost for these “level 2″ buildings would decrease and would immediately be available to all new players as well without having to build their level 1 counterparts because the technology is no longer new to them.

In this way new players can build bases, if not equal to, at least enough so that they can reasonably hold on long enough to build themselves up further to truly compete with the higher end players.

The problem of resource herding still exists by one group that has a pre-dominant control of the map, but it is not so large anymore and can also be dealt with in any number of ways. One such way is raw materials need to be sold to “NPC” manufacturers that can turn it into the workable resource for a price. And, only raw materials can be traded/sold amongst players.

In this way you create a circle that traps even the strongest kingdoms into needing other players to control parts of the map so they can sell between themselves to have money to build better bases.

Another way of alleviating new player issues would be to have a new game tutorial which plays itself like a single mission of a single player RTS. In this tutorial mission new players are not only introduced to the game, but depending on how well they complete it are given bonus raw materials at the start of the game. These bonuses can be gradually increased as time goes on so that a newer player who does the tutorial at the same level as an older player will start the game off with more resources than the older player did.

This handling of matters does not interfere with the older player, who has had extra time to play and has far surpassed what the new player has gained by the “bonus bump” from the tutorial and the new player is now given a fair chance at building up a base.

Anyway, that’s just what popped into my head on how to fix some of the issues brought up. There are plenty of other issues to deal with, but all of them can be overcome if a little bit of time is put into designing the game properly. I don’t think an MMORTS is doomed to failure if done right. Whether anyone does do it right, however, remains to be seen.

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Back in August I wrote a fairly short little post about the business sense of straying too far from what is “normal” when designing an MMOG. Just a few days ago I got an e-mail about that post from someone who disagreed. His stance was a game could be both innovative and intuitive to play. His example was Katamari Damacy.

I freely and openly admit to not having played the game so I’m going to go ahead and take his word for it that it has a quick and easy tutorial that gets you off and rolling around having fun in very little time. That got me thinking. Assuming that what he says is true, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t, how can this game, a game which has a pretty different twist on what you are doing and how to play it accomplish what many other games can’t?

Since this is an MMOG blog let’s take a look at the MMOGs I’m talking about to start. First up I’ll tear down a game I personally enjoy and am playing, Tabula Rasa. It wanted to do things in a new way, change up some fundamental aspects of how we play in our MMOGs…at least as much as was reasonable for them. They knew this would be new to a great many MMOG players, so they do have a tutorial.

The tutorial in Tabula Rasa is a lot of fun to play through, but does it really teach you all you need to know about how to be running and gunning in no time? I can’t say for certain. I’m used to playing shooters as well as MMOs so the combination of the two wasn’t such a big shock to my senses. For a great many people the tutorial probably got them in and started in no time. But what about those people who were like me when I wrote the post back in August. Those who had a game to go back to so they weren’t willing to stick out and wait for their fun when they could get it immediately? If a handful of posts from the beta boards are truthful, they probably left and never came back.

Now, that isn’t to say this is such a horrible thing. Chances are those people were never going to stick with the game long term, or possibly even buy it on release. It just wasn’t there cup of tea, and that’s perfectly fine. Still, that is a hurdle the MMOG designer needs to overcome. That’s an obstacle in the road. These games require investments of time and money larger than most others. People only really play one or two MMOGs at a time, and even then one is usually played more than the other, even if which game that is may switch from week to week or month to month.

Example two, City of Heroes tutorial. CoX is not a huge change from the standard MMOG. It has, as every game has, it’s own set of quirks and differences but on the whole coming from EQ or WoW, you know what you are going into with CoX. That said, they still have a tutorial. This tutorial teaches you the basics of their systems that don’t appear in other games, specifically inspirations and enhancements and how they work, as well as giving out a general introduction on normal playing and beating up the bad guys. It also happens to be a free level of experience for those that do it.

How good is it though, really? It will certainly get you started and will teach you pretty much all you need to know about the how the game works but it lacks something rather small, something that is easily overlooked and by all rights is not a problem inherent to the actual tutorial at all. You can, and many do, skip it after they have played the game for a while. They skip it because in all honesty it isn’t that much fun to play through and it is probably just as quick to get that level after the tutorial than during it.

This isn’t a huge gripe of course, that’s the basic premise behind the tutorial, teach you to play and then set you off into the wide open world. But looking at Tabula Rasa, I can’t help but think, for all the things that tutorial might not do right, it actually is quite a bit of fun to play and replay, which is good, because you may need to a few times.

The point of all this is that the game that innovated suffers from people who need the tutorial not wanting to bother with it, and the game that is fairly similar to the “standard” MMO gets people out and playing immediately, but they could just skip it entirely and still be okay. Essentially what I’m saying trying to show here is the game that actually needs a tutorial is losing their players before the game that doesn’t.

Assume for the moment that the statement above is true, even if you disagree with it. What does that mean when it comes to design and creation of MMOGs? How does that compare to the gold standard of the MMOG, World of Warcraft? I’ll be looking into that in the next article.

mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming, innovation, game design, tabula rasa, city of heroes

I found this sitting here in my drafts, mostly finished. I don’t know when I started writing it, a while ago it would seem, judging by the timeline I set up in the post. I also don’t know why I didn’t finish off the last bit of it much sooner and post it. These are questions I will probably never be able to answer. That having been said, I figured now is as good a time as any to finish it off so here we go. A post from the deepest pits of GamingMMO.com’s long-forgotten drafts page.

Enjoy!

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The year is quickly coming to an end. Normally I wouldn’t write anything in particular, since I already had my personal first year wrap up months ago, but everyone else is doing it, and hey, I’m a follower. Also, I haven’t posted much at all this month and I feel if I don’t post today then I will not start posting again regularly tomorrow, which would cause all sorts of problems.

Though certainly not the best year for MMOs there were definitely more interesting happenings than in many years prior. To highlight some of these goings on I decided to create a best (and worst) of list for whatever categories happened to pop into my head. If you’ve got your own “Best…” or “Worst…” post it in the comments; I’d love to hear.

Best Game Update/Patch

EVE Online: Trinity - Though it could be argued that this is more an expansion than a patch I’ll consider it, for the sake of having two separate categories (and winners) a patch, rather than an expansion. I’d say an expansion would be something you buy extra.

Now then, what makes “Trinity” so great? In case you didn’t hear, this is the patch where they completely overhauled the graphics, showing off some incredibly shiny new ships. There was other stuff too, of course, but that takes a back seat to the graphics, it’s the real reason people were so eager for it.

Pics via CrazyKinux

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There is a large break in the design process between PvE and PvP. There is little, if any crossover. Designing a game for one of these things doesn’t really work. Just ask Auran. People expect both from their MMO and when they get only one they feel cheated.

The problem, of course, from a purely developmental standpoint is that this requires (close to) twice the amount of work to be done. First you design one area of your game, and then the other and you have features for each. This wastes a lot of time and usually means the game is still heavily focused to one over the other (most likely PvE over PvP.) Essentially it becomes a matter of progressing through PvE content to advance (gain levels) and then, in the end, using those abilities to PvP.

But why? Why design a feature set for each and then have them be (for the most part) mutually exclusive? Why not mix them together a bit? Make PvP, entirely, a worthwhile (or hell, even doable) form of advancement. Design one set of features, reuse them between your PvE and PvP.

Don’t create battlegrounds for PvP and dungeons for PvE content. That is a waste of perfectly good development time. Make an instance which can do both. Mix them together. Allow them to be separate also, of course, you should still be able to choose one or the other just don’t design two different areas for what amounts to the same basic thing.

That’s not to say such an approach is not an investment of time, it certainly is, in designing the ability and tools to do this correctly in the first place, but, after having been implemented it allows much greater freedom to design really great areas. If your designers spend time on less areas they can make those areas really great. They can nail down the look, the sights, the sounds, the feel, they can get it all where it needs to be at.

And, speaking of double-dipping, why do we separate our genre’s so harshly in games? There is another waste if I’ve ever seen one. I think that will have to wait for another time though.

mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming, game design, pve, pvp

I, like a great many people using Wordpress, use Akismet for my spam protection. I’ve been noticing a problem recently though. It’s letting through things, more than once, which I have already filtered out as spam. This is annoying.

Not so say it isn’t a great filter, it still is, as it blocks hundreds of comments each day (and has never blocked a legitimate comment to my knowledge) but the ones that get through just seem like such a pain.

Where do MMOs come in to this picture? Primarily in thinking about how to detract from in-game spam (of gold, or power leveling services, etc.). I’m not sure how to go about it. My problem is, you see, not that I don’t have an idea on systems that could be put in place (beyond what any of the current games are doing) but that I can’t think of a system that is inherently beyond being overcome in a relatively short time.

I started using Akismet when this blog first went up. That’s just over a year now. In that time some comments are already starting to slip through the cracks. Spammers are not stupid people (or the people creating the bots doing the spamming, depending on what it happens to be.)

I’ve noticed this trend for a long time in my time administrating/moderating communities as well. As soon as you implement something meant to stop spammers it works for a short time and then they circumvent that and you are back to square one.

So, how can we combat this in an MMOG? Giving it some thought the best I could come up with was spam filters (similar to an Akismet or any other type of spam filter) is applied inside your chat system. Any messages that are considered “spam” by the computer system are filtered out so they are never seen by the general audience of your game but it will still show for the spammers. This would be similar to an “auto ignore” feature built into the chat system.

Text that the filter is unsure of would be sent through once and could then be “reported” by players as spam. After it reaches a certain threshold of reports it flags all additional messages in that same auto ignore bank.

Similarly players could report any message that slipped through the cracks as just a normal message and it could be then removed as spam and flagged as ignore. (I’ll ignore for the moment the obvious useful administrative options that this would give any CSR as far as reports go.)

Of course this isn’t flawless by any means. The system could be abused by players, and will be, no doubt. But, I think adding in an auto filter for chat is the next logical step to take. Pure reporting works fine for a while, but as games get bigger, and the business of breaking the rules of those games get bigger, we need to find different ways to attack it.

Just some random things I was thinking about, back to your business now.

Apparently, having already seen my glowing review of AFK Magazine and enjoying that so much I was recently sent an e-mail by Dave Taylor from Gamerzines.com Specifically he directed me to Issue #2 of their MMOZine.

I was not informed of Issue #1, which is just as well, because I seem to like second issues much more than first.

Now, as happy as I am to randomly pimp a site here for the free post it allows me, there actually was something in the e-mail I was sent that I did want to pass along, I’ll just quote to save time.

This issue we have a free LOTRO item giveaway thanks to CodeMasters, so the item is Europe servers only. All readers need to do is request a code via the form in the magazine and we’ll send them it via email. Then they retrieve it via their COG account for use in game. The item is called the Glass of Aglaral and it restores +1 Hope for a 1 hour period on each use. Handy when you’ve been defeated.

I don’t happen to be playing LotRO, nor am I European, however, if Sitemeter is to be believed a large portion of my readership is from various places in Europe (and a shockingly large number from Brazil, but that’s another story) so I thought it was worth passing on.

As for the magazine itself? Well, I haven’t gotten very far into it but a few things I did like. First being, you download the PDF to view it. We all know how I feel about in-browser viewing of magazines I think.

Another nice thing, their reviews. I didn’t see a single number anywhere. Just a few days ago I was discussing with my brother how I would much prefer to get rid of scores given to games and just make people actually read text so they could decide whether the game was for them and not be forced to look at some arbitrary number someone set up.

All things considered I’m liking it so far and I’ll be watching it from here on out. If you are interested you can check it out here.

mmozine, gamerzines, mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming, mmo reviews