Metagaming and Levels

A thread on the forums of an NWN1 PW reminded me of another of the evils of levels. They force metagaming in supposedly immersive roleplay environments.

Let’s take the humble gate guard and his role in the world. He is nearly ubiquitous; being one of the stock decorative NPCs whose role is to convey the idea that there is a ruling entity to “keep the peace”. He represents stability and government in whatever parts of the world are civilized. He is not all powerful. If he were, player characters would be redundant. All of those pressing issues that the denizens of the town have to deal with (a.k.a. quests) would get accomplished so much easier with a reliable police force instead of unreliable mercenaries and bounty hunters (a.k.a. player characters). Those orcs that keep raiding the settlements? Exterminated. Those bandits bothering the trade caravans? All locked up. That dragon (a.k.a. the raid instance) who takes a virgin every full moon as a “protection” payment? Long since stuffed and placed in a museum.

Obviously, the guards can’t be all powerful or these adventure tropes would not exist. Nor can they be all powerful, but too busy to do their jobs. We can’t take the argument that the guards are for the town only. No settlement of any size can survive without the support of the surrounding countryside. Cutting a town or city off from its lifeline to the surrounding countryside is exactly what besieging armies do. The sovereign territory of even the smallest city states extends far enough into the countryside to guarantee a supply of food and water for the city. A guard or militia that was technically capable of dealing with these problems, but chose not to… well, that is a genre by itself and when the characters in this genre have guns, we call it Half Life 2. Let’s presume for a moment that we are not roleplaying subversives in an Orwellian nightmare of a world. Then we are back to non-über guards.

Except there is a problem. Players inhabit our worlds. The player characters – especially elder game characters at or near the level cap – are supposed to be great heroes that are powerful. Except that there are a lot of these epic and unique individuals. Some of these great heroes are more like villains; or at least prone to rowdyism.

This causes a problem for the world in that non-über guards would die regularly at the hands of miscreant PCs. In this case, either the guards are being respawned on a regular basis, or being replaced on a regular basis with the near certainty that a powerful PC will come along and kill them in short order. Since we are after immersion, this straining of credibility is unacceptable. In addition to the lack of prowess, these guards usually do not have proper AI for dealing with miscreants. The “dumb” AI used on mobs, which seems so popular as a design decision for giving players a feeling of success when they pound the stuffing out of animated punching bags, only serves to make the guards weaker, clumsy, easily exploited, or all three.

The problem of course is that in order for the guards to be credible, they have to be completely over the top; or they have to be invulnerable or have some sort of god mode. The usual approach on roleplay oriented worlds is to make guards godlike and leave the awful AI. Then there is some rule about “using common sense” and pretending that they were not so weak, stupid or both after all. This is usually combined with a rule about requiring a GM to be present in order to play out the guards and keep control of the situation. From a purely immersion oriented standpoint, this sort of forced metagaming hurts the roleplay environment, rather than helping it.

I keep track of the forums of a number of roleplay persistent worlds of both the NWN 1/2 and MUD variety. The thread I mentioned in the opening sentence was very interesting. That world is in a Forgotten Realms setting. One of the players of a drow character wanted to clarify rules on sneaking onto a surface city. He was essentially told that doing so without a DM around was metagaming the NPC’s AI. A member of their community brought up a very good point.

I suspect the term metagaming is used slightly differently on compared to P&P gamers, or under vastly different circumstances.

Metagaming in the traditional meaning of the word is, though I expect violent protest against this, perfectly okay in many cases.

If, e. g., your characters are just about to start a journey to some faraway place, but you as players know that there’s a reset in five minutes, you might make your characters wait/prepare a little while so as not to be thrown back to your starting place by the reset. This is a clear case of metagaming – player knowledge changes character behaviour.

Players apparently ask about character levels here before partying to avoid the 5-level-gap-XP-penalty-mechanism, and their characters act accordingly. Again a case of metagaming – the characters have no concept of levels, XP or being in a party or not.

Sticking to certain rules or expected behaviours here requires a certain amount of metagaming in the traditional use of the word.

This particular server has a level cap of 30; which puts you well into the “epic” category under the 3E Dungeons and Dragon’s ruleset. We have a dissonance here. We are trying to achieve immersion conductive to roleplay, yet we have to explicitly spell out rules of conduct for when to take NPCs at face value and when not to; in short, how to metagame to preserve the fiction. This sort of officially sanctioned metagaming nonsense happens all over. Are there rules governing experience payout when there is a large level difference between characters? This is officially sanctioned metagaming. Are there any level based unlocks for gear, content, etc? Again, officially sanctioned metagaming. Do mobs not drop the equipment that they were obviously wielding? Etc. In such cases, we are asked to pretend we don’t see the gyrating elephant.

The lead developer of the server had a comment in the thread that was probably intended to be snarky:

My suggestion: Let’s put the level cap of Amia at 5. All problems solved

Interestingly enough, what if there was such a cap? That world would probably lose its playerbase. In my experience in the NWN PW roleplay scene, higher level caps tend to correlate with higher achiever/gamist focus at the loss of the other foci. Such a playerbase will always strike a balance between gameplay and immersion that errs on the gameplay side and have to live with the metagaming that it entails.

What about players who would not be scared away by such a policy? The dramists and simulationists of the world use the immersion factor to drive their play more so than the gameplay factor. Guards no longer need to be über because even the greatest of heroes are not invincible.

But is it viable?

NWN 1/2 makes a good data source for looking at this as it is a standardized “codebase” where the engine mechanics are the same or similar; so we can presumably make direct comparisons based on how high the level cap is. What does not bode well for this type of approach is that the seven NWN1 PWs categorized under roleplay that are currently up and have level caps below 20 as I write this have 25 players between them; with seventeen on “Zombie Survival”, six on one, two on another and the other four empty. On the NWN2 side, one of the two servers with a cap of 15 has two players and the other is empty. In total, the number of players on roleplay category servers currently number in the low hundreds between the two platforms.

This is interesting to me as the results of Nick Yee’s player motivations research suggests that there should be a large subset of roleplayers who don’t highly value achievement. Could it be that having the numbers available means that players want to metagame and will actively choose a world with higher level counts? Is this an artifact due to a large percentage of NWN players being attracted specifically to the D&D ruleset and its traditions? Is it because players simply expect achievement, even if they are not attracted to it explicitly? Or is it simply that the low cap worlds have other problems?

These are intersting questions for an immersion oriented designer.

Prepreproduction

There are certain things that I’ve done and that I’ve seen done that can contribute to a world imploding during development. As I’d mentioned in earlier installments of the Etilica postmortem and as Phil had also mentioned in the comments, Etilica needed to be “clean” when it left beta. How might have this been accomplished? You need solid preproduction. Professional game developers tend to use terminology derived from the entertainment industry. Thus, instead of requirements, specification, design, development and testing phases, they have preproduction, production, rollout and operation. There is a pretty clean overview of this process, written by Richard Bartle in his book, Designing Virtual Worlds. Some of these bullet points are not entirely applicable to small teams and hobbyists, but the basic idea holds. I can say from experience that you should not skimp on the preproduction phase. I can’t guarantee that having one will be the magic bullet of your success, but not having one will give you grief.

At the end of “preproduction”, you want to have to following two things:

A design document that you can always refer back to - There are excellent write-ups here and here on Gamasutra for writing design documents. “Real” designers may have better things to do than write documentation when they really want to build, but that document will encapsulate your vision for everyone on the team. If your team always remains one or two guys, you can get away with not doing this. This document will entail how the subsystems (of the prototype below) function, how gameplay works, special shticks if the world has any, and basic, bullet pointed lore.

A working prototype with all of the core systems in place - A barebones world with all of the core systems in place should be playable. It may not be recognizable as the one you are planning to build; in fact, it is better if it is not. It does need to have all of your complex custom subsystems in place. Do you have a unique faction system? Do you have a custom dynamic encounter system, loot systems, crafting, character advancement, death, scripted AI, etc? These should all be in place.

A professional team would probably just have something minimal to show case gameplay ideas and leave their implementation up to the programming team during production. For a world build by volunteer hobbyists and indies, you’ll need more. The industry term for a pre-alpha, yet vaguely playable level mockup is a hull. A hull has no visual details and probably only has a plain texture thrown on the geometry to be able to see it in a game engine. It is just for testing concepts at this point.

You’ll need a keel (yes, a play on hull) for your world. You and the team you recruit will be extending it from there, but the foundation remains the same.

What you should avoid:

Resist the allure of “agile methods” during preproduction– Many amateur worldsmiths have probably never heard of agile methods, such as SCRUM. It can be an alluring idea. The central concept behind agile methods involves creating a deliverable every 30 days (or 20 days, or 6 weeks, etc.). The opposing approach, known as waterfall development, is currently out of fashion among software developers. Its premise was first you clearly define your requirements (qualitatively what the software will need to accomplish), then you clearly specify a set of key performance indicators (KPI’s) in a specification document (quantitatively what the software will need to accomplish), then you design it from soup to nuts and finally you sit down to write the code. The idea is that the code will flow and be relatively (not completely) bug free. Waterfall development often suffers from the problem that requirements are not completely known initially, or change, or that a proposed design element is not as completely and utterly awesome as envisioned once coded.

Agile development came into fashion because it addresses this. Taking your development in bite sized chunks has great merit. Ensuring that you have a deliverable every 30 days is a great way to keep moral up (after all, milestones are clearly being reached). A protracted design phase – as happens with waterfall development methods – can give people the feeling that nothing is happening and cause them to leave. I’ve seen this firsthand more than once. Often, there is some guy insisting on doing iterative development from day one. If you follow his advice, your group will quickly make progress and will be passing around its first screenshots in no time. In fact, I’ve seen more than one group on MMORPGMAKER use screenshots as the evaluator of progress. Then sometime down the road, you’ll run into a wall where your world is of undocumented complexity or there is no clear consensus about a particular design point.

Having a design document to refer back to prevents this. Save the SCRUM for production. In fact, you will be practicing waterfall development where preproduction is the requirements/specification/design phases all rolled into one and production is the implementation phase. Learn to love it.

Don’t recruit your team until after preproduction – Remember what I said about members feeling that nothing is happening? During preproduction, there will be a phase where it seems this way. After the initial brainstorming phase, there comes a period when you have to flesh these ideas out and come up with a design document and perhaps some code design to do with it for the prototype. That modeler you recruited from deviant art on the second week? He won’t have anything playable to put his models into. That lore writer you found? At this point, she’ll either start rewriting your cannon or will get bored and go back to whatever forum you found her on. That programmer you found on sourceforge? Programmers have a habit of measuring their productivity by code written. This is especially so for undergrads looking for a project to burnish their resume with. Once you have a design document in hand, have chosen an engine and prototyped your main gameplay elements, your project will look much more attractive and will give a greater feeling of progress. It will be much easier to recruit and hold onto people.

Lastly, having a design document handy when recruiting allows you to recruit them into the vision. I can’t stress enough the need for all of the team to drink the kool aid; even if nobody else in the universe does. This allows your world to have direction and not turn into a herd of cats.

What defines a successful world?

Obviously, there is the commercial definition: one that pays for its own development in a reasonable amount of time and costs less to operate than it takes in as revenue. I’ll ignore WoW here, but many of the older commercial worlds are commercial successes; even if they are not blockbusters. The trend in AAA worlds is that the development costs have skyrocketed so high that they are generally doomed to failure in the economic sense.

But what about hobbyists’ worlds? What defines a success there? When is a world successful?

Thoughts?

Action Oriented Progression – Part II

Since Brian Green will likely finish his levels theme with his own proposal soon and D^t already has presented his own ideas on the theme, I thought I’d drop in my own proposal. As I alluded in part I, the oversimplification of combat in the D&D/Diku level based tradition closes many avenues for gameplay and roleplay. Traditionally, the alternative to levels is skill based systems. Here, I’d like to propose my own variant on skill based systems; action orient progression.

Every action stands on its own as its own skill - By action here, I man every atomic action. A strike to the head is one action. A recovery to a stance is another.

Actions can be combined into combinations – And these combinations constitute their own virtual actions. Combining a feint and strike together into one action is such a virtual action. It can never be better than the skill of the individual actions, but the cleanliness and speed of the transition from feint to strike is a property of the combo. Karate’s katas are like this. Every individual move is its own action, yet many hours of practice are required for the ensemble to reach perfection.

Actions can have synergy – The feint and strike above are an example. Knowing one helps with the other. Obviously, knowing each helps training the combo and vice versa. Learning the combo allows the character to break it apart and use just the individual components.

Actions can have multiple levels of synergy – Combination moves have high degrees of synergy with their components. A fighting style as a whole (Karate, Italian school of swordsmanship, etc.) would have a lower level of synergy, but still much more than it has with basket weaving or mountain climbing.

Recognizing actions when performed by others is also a skill – An unskilled swordsman will telegraph his movements to a skilled observer and will not recognize the feint for what it is.

Actions improve with use – a sword swing might get faster, do a bit more damage and telegraph less.

Actions decay with misuse – Stop practicing your swordsmanship for six months and you’ll get rusty. You won’t lose it entirely, but you will get rusty.

Skill learning happens online. Skill improvement happens offline (EVE style) – You first learn a skill online. Your character perfects it with a mind number of practice rounds while you are offline. Actual play is the application of those skills, not the source of them. This would hopefully have the effect of being self balancing using market-like mechanisms. If a particular action, or school of actions is unusually effective, then many players will want to train them. This is the gold rush effect. Many characters being skilled at a particular action decreases its effectiveness (see the recognizing part above). This combines with atrophy in other skills to encourage characters to move on. This would create fads. If there is a large enough palette of actions, even within a domain such as swordsmanship or magic, no single character can master everything, there should be incentive to seek out and try new approaches, combinations, etc.

Lastly, we have the problem of button overload. Having every action accessible creates a tyranny of commands and pretty soon the UI would look like the cockpit of a fighter jet. This, combined with half second lags on PWs and a general unpopularity of manual combat suggest a need to NOT force the player into Tekken style button mashing. Neither Age of Conan nor D&D Online is very successful and both use manual attack controls. Which brings us to the last feature:

Conditional execution and branching of action combinations – This is a big one for the designer because he is explicitly allowing – no encouraging – the players to write macros/scripts. If I had an action combination that put my fighter into a defensive stance and then reacted “IF I see a strike; BLOCK it and KICK him in the gnards; RETURN to stance ”, I’d essentially be writing combat AI scripts for my character. You’d have to limit the complexity of player made scripts for performance reasons, but I think it opens up many new doors.

These things combined – if they worked out – would reduce grind, encourage inventive builds and player created content. And yeah, you could buid a newbie pole-arm fighter who could take on more experienced fighters with an inventive stance. I think it it is worth the experiment.

Role Playing and Ill Mental Health

There was an article on Ars Tenchnia the other day regarding a colloquium given by Dmitri Williams of USC using data provided by SoE on its Everquest 2 servers. Buried about two thirds of the way down was the following alarming quote:

Buried among those happy, average players was a small subset of the population—about five percent—who used the game for serious role playing and, according to Williams, “They are psychologically much worse off than the regular players.” They belong to marginalized groups, like ethnic and religious minorities and non-heterosexuals, and tended to use the game as a coping mechanism.

I found the characterization of “serious sole-play” as indicative of having psychological problems off base somehow. Since Nick Yee’s latest iteration of his player motivations work puts role playing as the primary motivator for 4% of the playing population the knee jerk reaction would be to put two and two together and come to the conclusion that serious role players are deranged. Sure, there are phychologically unstable roleplayers, just as some achievers are achievers in-game because they are utter losers in real life.

Tobold brought up an interesting point; that the researchers involved were conflating the term “role player” as the general society uses it and “role player” as the subculture that plays on MUDS, MMOs and PWs uses it.

The 5% minority of people who think that role-playing means theatrics, background stories, and speaking in character, did achieve one important victory in insisting that their activity was called “role-playing”, and was the only true way of role-playing. They even got their own “role-playing servers” in some games. Unfortunately for them, their triumph ends there. Many people still regard them as weirdos or at least geeks, and those scientists attesting to their “psychological problems” aren’t helping. But in reality most of the self-styled true role-players are pretty normal, and just enjoy the added creativity. It isn’t much different from people doing improvisational theatre, and few people think those have psychological problems (except those who think that all artists are weird).

So there you have it, the problem is simply a badly defined term. “Role-playing” means different things to different people, and there is no one true definition, as much as some people might disagree with that.

From what Raph Koster had copy-pasted from the article into his comments on it and from not seeing the paper itself; my impression is that the authors correlated high levels of play with mental health issues. This would roughly correlate with the fact Nick Yee’s most recent primary motivations paper puts the population of those with escapism as the primary motivation at 2.5%. Considering that I’ve not seen the error bars on either number, but I do recall escapism correlating with play time. Then this would mesh. So it’s escapists with high levels of play, not the roleplayers doing improvisational theatre and writing bad fiction that Dr Williams was referring to.

Action Oriented Progression – Part I

What makes one swordsman better than another? Many years ago, I was in the Society for Creative Anachronism. There, I knew a man who was probably in his late 30’s or early 40’s at the time. He was of average build, docile temperament, not terribly fit (though not overweight) and certainly not muscular. He was a bearded dork of a man who could dent 14 gauge helmets with ease and was a “Duke”; a two time winner of bi-annual regional (northeastern US) tournaments. His predisposition was towards combo strikes. Usually – but not always, he would lead in with one or more feints. It was quite normal for the strike to appear as if it was going towards one side and you’d find your helmet ringing from a blast of rattan to the other side; leaving you to wonder how he managed that.

Becoming highly ranked in tournament SCA heavy weapons combat, or any other competitive, full contact martial sport, requires three things. Firstly, it requires an immense amount of practice; both on the basics and on combining them into combinations. Karate’s katas are an example of the latter. When you go through a kata a mind numbing number of times, you are teaching your brain and body not only how to execute individual motions well, but also how to smoothly transition. The second thing that is required is a good feel for how those actions look when others perform them. Does that slight twitch in the shoulder precede the start of a left hook by 50 milliseconds? Lastly, there is judgment. Do I lead off with a feint? If so, how far do I commit? Do I appear to drop my guard and draw him in? But what if he actually managed to exploit that? Etc.

With the traditional Dungeons and Dragons/Diku approach to combat – sometimes euphemistically referred to as “heroic combat”, this is all under the hood. Click on attack (or type and hit enter) and wait while the numbers crunch. It follows D&D’s abstraction of combat, which is derived from chainmail’s abstraction of combat. Now a circa early 1970’s tabletop wargame needed abstracted combat. You were moving dozens of figure around the table, representing hundreds of combatants. It was simply not practical any other way. The approach on D&D made sense as well. It kept the pace of the game up rather than bogging down in die rolls and calculations as some of the early PnP RPGs were prone to. The rules explicitly stated that it was an abstraction that that you were expected to fill in the blanks using your imagination. It also had the advantage of readily merging back into tabletop wargame play if you were running a Chainmail or Battlesystem battle.

What abstracted heroic combat can’t do very effectively is explicitly capture the true feint, feint, strike nature of melee combat. In tabletop play, a GM can embellish it verbally. In a computer game, you can only look at canned animations and perhaps watch basic textual feedback roll by.

When I was in the SCA, I usually fought pole-arm. This was initially to help my household (team/guild) out by providing a pole weapon fighter for large melees. An SCA regulation polearm is a six foot rattan staff with the last two feet padded. It is a “nerfed” (but certainly not bofo) halberd or glaive. The fighters in a shield wall can be classified as tank or DPSer; with the weapon and shield men as the tanks and the spears and pole-arms as DPSers. I took to the “weapon” like a duck to water and had an unusual stance when fighting singles. Most pole arm fighters – at least at the time – held the pole pointed at the opponents head. I pointed it at his feet. This allowed me to more easily parry with the pole and exploit low openings. This stance also carried a psychological advantage. Very often, when fighting someone for the first time, they were simply unsure about how to deal with me because the unusual stance. It was not something in their playbook and I was able to use this to perform better than my skill level. You certain can’t do THIS with levels and heroic combat. In generic MMO terms, I was a low level DPSer. The other guy would have beaten me every time in an MMO. Heck, he could have been AFK and I would not have been able to touch him.

Next up – my own little proposal for an alternative, which is a derivative of skill based systems.

Levels

I was going to post on another subject, but then Brian Green asked what we thought of levels. I have strong opinons. They have their place as a measure of troop effectiveness in the tabletop miniatures wargaming origins of D&D and as a “coming of age” proxy in the epic storylines of long D&D campaigns and single player RPGs. I also think that they are part of the problem in online worlds.

If you are playing a chainmail session, from which D&D was originally derived – or the later Battlesystem rules (which is simply an updated Chainmail); then levels are a simple and clear marker of the skill level and relative competence of the troops involved. They boiled down to the likelihood that it would put an opposing unit out of action when they were in contact. You had few knights, but the ones you did have were powerful; especially if you managed to hit that big phalanx of light infantry over there…

In campaigns; both the group PnP and single player CRPG variety, they play a valuable part of the narration. They add another axis of character development. There is the plot development. There is the character interrelationship development. Lastly, there is the slow growth of the character from someone who is sent to kill ten rats to a hero of herculean stature. This was brilliantly executed in Bioware’s Baldur’s gate series. Over the course of a couple of hundred hours of play, your saw how your character slowly moved from a sheltered teenager in Candlekeep into roles that he/she did not even know existed before and eventually even had the option to become a deity. All along the way, his/her grown in epic stature was noticed and noted by those around.

Traditionally, PnP Dungeons and Dragons has a population per level decrease that fits a power law function with an R Squared number ridiculously close to 1. What this means is that first level characters are by far the most common and the bulk of the population is in the first few levels. This fits the tabletop wargame scenario where those knights were few and it fits the long campaign scenario where the characters become someone special and cavort with kings and deities.

Now here is a problem. Take any world that uses level, does not have permadeath and has been operating for some time. Then look at its character database. From the anecdotal evidence that I’ve seen, actually doing such surveys on one world and seeing the data from such a survey on another, I’d be willing to bet that you will see a bimodal distribution. The first spike will be lowbie characters. Some will have been created by players who came, saw, didn’t like what they saw and left. Others will be concept characters who never really took hold of the player’s imagination, mules, etc. The population per level will rapidly drop down to a tiny fraction of this number and remain there… until the level cap. The level cap is where all of the sufficiently long-played mains will be. The only ways to keep this spike down are to have permadeath, or a sufficiently long and nasty grind that the natural churn of your playerbase will ensure that many players never reach the cap.

What this effectively means is that the long played mains are all at the level cap. That specialness that came from high level? It just went right out the window. Now if everyone is high level, then the designers have to gear towards high level content. Pretty soon, the high level content is the norm. It is almost as if that is the standard. Now let’s be clear about it. Bartle’s cliché about nobody being a hero if everyone is absolutely true. If everyone and everything is uber, then it becomes pedestrian. Except that in order to play the office space endgame – which is the real game – you have to go grind school first; starting from kindergarten. The level cap is the standard; then why the did I just do all this grinding to reach the level cap so that I can be like everyone else?

As they are usually implemented (no PD, cap can be reached in a human amount of time), levels just force you to do something that most players do not enjoy (though there is a certain type of player who actually enjoys grindng) just to “earn” your place in the main game.

Portmortem: Etilica – Management Lessons

I took away some management lessons from Etilica.

A world needs a “vision” that everyone on the team signs onto - That vision needs to include technical standards and accepted approaches to problems. In short, there needed to be a design document. Amateur hobbyists don’t usually write design documents, but among hobbyist teams, it is very common for the initial builders to pass the torch, even when the admins remain the same. ETI was built by multiple generations. The people working on the server when it left beta were not those who did the initial work and they were also not the ones who took over as the live team. Every builder that ever worked on the server had his own way of doing things. The one before me who called himself a “lazy scripter” in his comments made me want to poke my eyes out with a fork. Sometimes, those ways did not mesh and sometimes they actively undermine the vision.

Selling builders on the vision is a marketing task.

Know when to ignore the forums - Also in the face of player whining. If you want your world to be about cute fluffy bunnies that also happen to be demon worshipping undead, then stick to that vision. Somewhere out there, there are players looking for exactly your vision. If you are constantly modifying it to the whims ofthose for whom your vision does not coincide with their idea of perfection, then you’ll turn your world into something that you no longer love; and those players will still leave. Unless it fits their idea of perfection, or they have a social anchor, they will be fickle and leave sometime.

This requires discipline. The temptation to change the server to fit the players that it has is strong; especially in a genre or platform that is on the wane and difficult to find players for. I was severely guilty of this. On more than one occasion, I put the server into a gyration because of what the players were saying on the forums. This lack of an anchor inadvertently helped its downfall I think.

Changing the nature of the server overnight – The admins and builders who brought the server through beta started a new server plot shortly after the end of beta. A far away undead nation ruled by a lich emperor took over the main city and started a war. Overnight, the server turned very dark. It was a good server plot and gave the players a “reason” for their characters actions. Unfortunately, it was too dark for many players. There was loud protest and the playerbase rapidly dwindled. The leads lent on hiatus shortly afterwards, probably due to a feeling of discouragement, and there was a complete turnover of the live team. Generic D&D fantasy and goth undead lovers are two distinct crowds. You can’t gear populate the server with one and then gear it towards the other. This means that if you do have large, overreaching, server plots, they have to be consistent with the types of players that you are attracting to the server in the first place.

Wait! Is this not contradictory to the “know when to ignore players” rule? Not really. Just as selling your vision to the team is a marketing task, so is selling it to the players. BUT… you can’t bait and switch.

No PW builder/dev should ever say “I can’t script/program”. They should say “I’m going to learn how to script/program” – Too many people who tended to say the former worked on Etilica. NWN has a nice add on tool created by Lilac Soul. It is a script generator. It greatly helps builders who lack the skills and are not willing to learn them to build modules quickly. The problem is that persistent worlds are complex enough that if you have to use a script generator, then you are going to end up with a buggy, Frankenstein monster.

Thrym is an excellent example of how to do it right. He knew nothing about NWN’s scripting language (or modding that engine in general) when he started building Markshire. He had a vision and the drive to learn the necessary skills and became very competent.

The Managers need to be technically competent enough to have a clue – What I said above for builders hold especially true for the management. You need to be prepared to wear all hats. Yes, this might mean learning to code or animate. Everyone has a dream that they would like to build. The difference between a lead and a builder is that the latter has decided that his vision is too big to build himself and that he’d rather work on something else that sees the light of day rather than his own project that might never do this. A manager who is not willing to learn the requisite skills is entirely dependent on others; finding those builders who don’t want to waste time on their own visions. In doing so, he is making his world less attractive. Seriously, who wants to do all the gruntwork for someone else’s vision if they are not willing to do it themselves? It also makes the world vulnerable to being altered by a builder who does not share that vision.

Communication is like oxygen to the live team– It should be so obvious that it does not need to be said, but there needs to be a central communications hub. The builders, including and especially myself, were very active on Etilica’s forums; but used IM very little. The head admin was rarely on the forums, but held court on IM. Some of the DMs used IM to varying degrees. This was a recipe for non-communication among the live team. It actually surprised me on more than one occasion when someone who was not active on the forums or in development was made acting lead.

I’m strongly partial to forums for their asynchronous nature. This keeps the whole team in the loop regardless of time zone or the hours they keep. Even when IRC and IM chat logs are archived for those not present, the signal to noise ratio usually makes them so painful to read that nothing is gained.

Postmortem: Etilica’s Lag – Part II

Since this is post two of the lag theme, I’ll catalog the things that I would have done differently as a live team dev. Later in the week I can delve into design and management lessons. I’ll try to keep the lessons generic and skip the platform specific ones. What I’d do differently taking over running the live team of a world now:

Perform an exhaustive survey of the world – Let’s not trust the documentation; even if it exists. Even among professional teams, the design docs are likely to be outdated. Let’s assume that we don’t have a large block of time for a handover. Up to date design docs and handover meetings are luxuries that professionals have. The alternative that amateurs have is to survey the server. Don’t change anything until all of the resources are understood.

Run scheduled stress tests – Do you have a new AI package? Have you completely revamped your honey pot zones? Do you have a fancy schmancy new dynamic content generator or crafting system? Run a scheduled stress test on a dev server before making those changes live. Advertise it to your playerbase like you would an event. Beg, borrow and steal players from other places just to be there for the stress test.

Make sure that there is only ONE definitive version of the module – From Thrym’s observations of the Etilica in the comments on part one, I suspect that he is looking at a different version than I worked on. I know that there were multiple, unsynchronized versions of the module lying about. Sometimes it was a mystery as to who had a version of the module with which changes. I made the biggest changes and made the most cleanup, but other versions sometimes slipped into the live position or were passed to builders. Etilica should have been committed to a version control system such as Perforce or SVN, so that changes could be tracked, rolled back and there would be only one head revision.

What I would not do is start overhauling the module at the kind of rate that I did last time - There were certain things that needed to be done to whip Etilica into shape that were not really practical, or were just so painful to do that nobody wanted to do them. First and foremost, there was the issue of the half-implemented and orphaned script packages and other resources. A huge portion of the module’s resources were deprecated, but could not safely be removed without an exhaustive and time consuming survey of the mod. There are no tools for that engine that allow you to search for deprecated and unused resources. Moreover, many obscure resources WERE used somewhere. You would be surprised how many different AI scripts were in use and how many item and creature templates popped up somewhere; but making changes too rapidly in a cruft encrusted environment is asking for trouble.

Postmortem: Etilica’s Lag – Part I

Several former Etilica players have commented about the lag on that world. That is my fault and I learned a great deal from it. Allow me to explain. In part II, I’ll list what I would have done differently if I were to work on that world again.

The buzzword on ETI is cruft. ETI was built by three generations of builders who overlapped very little or not at all. It had about 250 areas (small zones) and an immense number of placed NPCs when I started overhauling it in earnest; even in places where players rarely went. I think I counted 400 placed NPCs when I started cataloging them. ETI’s NPCs also had a heavy heartbeat script (which fires every six seconds on that platform) and heavy combat scripts; courtesy of me. I think in many respects, it catalogs a list of mistakes that can be made when building and running a server. There are many things that can be learned from examining the life and death of ETI, but here I will concentrate on my lag. When I took over as lead builder, I made two server killing mistakes:

I did not completely familiarize myself with the mod as much as I should have – This was ultimately fatal. There were big parts of the module – especially in the desert (about 2/3 of the world was in the desert) – that were so hard to get to that I only ever saw them in the toolset or via DM client teleport when testing. The very first thing that I should have done was to catalog all of the areas and familiarize myself with them; even the rarely visited ones. I quickly grew intimate with the high traffic portions of the mod, but not the low traffic areas. Had I done this, I would have been aware of the placed NPC count.

I did not stress test the server before making changes live - I brought in a couple of AI systems that I had worked on for my NWN version of Epoch. They included custome a waypoint walker, a new heartbeat routine and a heavily modified version of Jasperre’s combat AI package to spice up combat.

Altogether, they were heavy in terms of CPU. They worked fine on Epoch, which was small and heavily dynamic. Most NPCs were only around when there was actually a PC in the area. On ETI, this caused an enormous amount of overhead on the server. It only took one player getting into a heavy fight somewhere on the server to cause serious lag. Also, there was a rebuild of the main high traffic areas. They were arguably nicer, prettier and more immersive. They were also prone to lag afterwards as well. Sometimes a plain soundstage is the best. A proper scheduled stress test would have revealed this.