Live Team Drift

Last week, Brian Green wrote about how individual worlds change over time, specifically using WoW and Meridian 59 as examples about how various rebalancing and bugfixes change the dynamics of the world (e.g. with ranged weapons in M59) and how demographic changes in a world’s player population prompt changes as well (such as the erosion of immersion in the Wolfshead article that prompted Green’s post). As far as I know, there is no specific term for this, though “Live Team Drift” might be appropriate. Community worlds are just as prone to this as commercial ones. Amia’s recent introduction of a “job system” is a specific example. Thrym, the lead admin of Markshire and one of IGN’s Neverwinter vault editors, constantly introduced new subsystems to Markshire and while I was the lead dev on Etillica, I was also prone to major overhauls of the world.

The reasons that live teams do this are many. If fact, community worlds are probably even more prone to it as they tend to launch in less than polished states (pre-alpha being more the norm) and are constant works in progress. Sometimes it is to fix glaring bugs or imbalances. The list of NWN worlds that started out with a “we don’t want to nerf or change spells” policy and then went on to customize (and nerf) the scripts for nearly the entire spellbook is long and illustrious. Sometimes, it is to try and make the world truer to its ideals for its actual (or intended) playerbase; such as devdisco’s job system on Amia. Sometimes it is to expand or deepen a particular gameplay aspect that the players or admins are fond of; such Hephaestus’ extensive additions and modifications to Mythos’ implementation of Craftable Natural Resources (CNR). The fact is that any actively administered and developed world will change over time and possible even be unrecognizable to earlier players.

Green asked the question “Do you enjoy your favorite MMORPG more or less because of the changes that have been applied to it?”

This is like asking about your favorite model year of your favorite model of car. Is the latest Ford Mustang the best? One from recent years? Another from the late 60’s? You’ll never get an objective or consistent response.

It is never just a game

I keep track of several roleplay PWs on various platforms. One of them is Arelith, an NWN1 world. I highly respect the team that built and maintains the world. Their world is a mod of a seven year old game that last had an expansion nearly five years ago, yet the community is still healthy and active.

One thread on its forums however caught my eye, because it is about a design decision that makes me cringe. Like most NWN PWs, Arelith is a diku style world with a serial martyrdom death system. It has the slight variant to this that a dead character can either respawn, or wait until someone brings their corpse somewhere to be raised. If they are revived, they escape the death penalty that would otherwise have been applied. So far, this is typical NWN and there are many variants on this theme; some of which leave the player’s camera at the scene of death and others that move the camera to a death plane, leaving the corpse behind that can be revived. In NWN, the camera is tied to the PC avatar, so the latter is usually accomplished by moving the avatar to another location and leaving a corpse object behind. In Arelith’s case, the corpse object can be picked up and it can also be destroyed. The owner of the dead character currently gets a message indicating whenever their corpse has been picked up, dropped or destroyed, but not who did it. If the corpse has been destroyed, the destroyer gets a skull, a small amount of money and the “victim” loses his/her get out of jail free card and must take the respawn penalty.

This is where the fun begins. There is a mechanism where one player can make gain by inflicting other players with a perceived loss.

I’m not privy to the motivations for that design, though I suspect a pen and paper (PnP) D&D influence. Most likely, the convincing arguments were on a gamist and/or simulationist basis. In the former case, the idea that someone would want to avoid the “legitimate” penalty for failure is anathema. In the latter case, there is a realism factor in carrying corpses. I’m not actually interested in the specifics of the system or in the reasoning behind it so much as in the effect on the players. Some players have little or no advancement motive. If the player does not derive pleasure from counting points, grinding is a job; an entry level, low pay, low status job and loss of avatar capital is akin to not being paid for putting in your hours at McDonalds. Such players will go to great lengths to avoid a death penalty. If there is a way for them to avoid it by waiting for a rez, then they will do so.

If another player comes along and takes away that escape clause, it will cause distress. There are lots of arguments that the whole thing is entirely appropriate because it is in character (IC) and that it is just a game, so nobody should get worked up. Such arguments forget a little aspect of human psychology. When people feel that another player – as a player – has screwed them – as a player – over, then what is IC and what is metagaming simply does not matter. It does not matter if that player feels that it is entirely legitimate that the victim accepts the penalty. The victim feels that they are losing hours of grinding at the hands of another player; especially as it is not on a consensual basis. It is as if someone jumped on their sand castle and losing your sand castle this way is never just a game.

If you wanted to create a gameplay mechanic tailor made for griefing, you could do little better than Arelith’s corpse bashing, except perhaps by adding permadeath to the mix. Well, you could remove the message that a character’s corpse has been destroyed, causing them to wait in vain.

Anyone who has ever read through Nick Yee’s excellent work researching MMO player motivations may have caught the fact that the roleplay motivations are quite independent from other motivations. They might also have noticed that the roleplayer motivations are held more often by females and older players and the competition tends to be a motive for younger, male, players. In short, though you can’t make the blanket statement that roleplayers are carebears, the transect between the darkfall playerbase and the roleplayer motivation is only a fraction of the roleplay crowd. If your world is Darkfall meets roleplay and you are building for those players whole like to be IC while they gank people, then you can just tell the victim that he is being a whiney carebear and be done with it. Otherwise you have to do your best to “goon proof” your world.

There is a general rule that 1% of the population is sociopathic. This does not mean that they are raving serial murderers, but it means that at least one percent of the population – a subset composed almost entirely of males, so 2% of all men – lack empathy. Some are simply indifferent to the needs of others. Others actively enjoy inflicting anguish. The anonymity of online games is an attractant to these people in the same way that sweets attract bears at a campsite; so we have to reckon that our sociopath fraction is higher than 1%. Even if there was no gain to the character that destroyed the corpse, such people will derive pleasure from it for its own sake. That world currently has a problem with a griefer who repeated returns despite being repeatedly being banned. If he were more sophisticated, he’d not be attacking live characters, but instead anonymously bashing corpses. Such an individual could operate indefinitely, cause a great deal of psychological harm and never be caught. How many such individuals are currently operating this way on Arelith, using the IC cover that their character is evil? In addition to the bona fide sociopaths, a sizable portion of the playbase will not be averse to putting the screws to someone outside their monkeysphere if there was something to be gained from it. They’ll give plausible IC justifications of course, but the fact is that they – as players – are defecting when they harm other players in a non consensual way. This may sound strange coming from a advocate of strong IC systems, but “it is IC” can also be used as a pretext for a player to be a wanker. A “be nice” rule is meaningless in such an environment.

With this in mind, consider that your highly networked players are statistically more likely to be older females. 40 year old librarians who live with three cats and can name every character from the Wheel of Time series are a bit more likely to end up victimized by such a scheme than to be perpetrators. It is a hard fact that some of your players – the highly networked ones – are simply more valuable to the health of your community than others. These people won’t say a word, they’ll just leave for greener pastures and their friends will eventually follow them. This has happened before. I’ve spoken to one roleplay NWN2 PW admin who had his playerbase decimated by a something awful faction moving in. (Edit) Some of them (SA people/goons) seem to be excellent roleplayers, but they’ll still leave your world as a bloody, empty corpse if they don’t like it; and still might anyway even if they do. (/Edit) Now imagine if goons invaded your world? Do you have any systems that can abused to empty it?

The question I’d have for the server admin is whether he/she has an overview of the usage patterns of this bashing feature. Any time you have a gameplay feature that can be abused, you should assume that it will be and closely monitor it. The best way would be logging corpse related actions (perp playername & character name, victim playername and character name, the races of the two, was it bashed? Dropped into a container? Rezzed? Etc.) to a database and periodically pull it into Excel to data mine it in a pivot table. Such surveys would tell the server management who is doing what and under what conditions and would let them easily root out abuses of the system.

As for player behavior, he/she should also consider game theory and that if there is a gain and no penalty for defecting, eventually defecting will become the norm. He should resist calls to exacerbate the problem by removing the message that the corpse has been destroyed and instead give a clear indication of who picked the body up and what they did with it (e.g. if it was put down and where or put into another container). Such accountability may be metagaming, but by exposing players to a possible tit-for-tat retaliation if they defect, it enforces the be nice rule.

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.