Mob Mode Conversations

One approach to handling the mob mode greeting problem is to allow players access to a conversation editor and allow them to edit the canned conversations that their PC would engage in while in mob mode. Nobody will take the kind of care with such conversations as a player could. A character could branch conversation trees based on who is speaking with them, when and where. A player who aims to be a merchant could open trading and even possibly negotiation conversation branches; even setting buy/sell prices based on who is asking. The player could allow friends of the character to pick him/her up and go out on runs. For example, two players plan to go to the dark dungeon of doom in the far corner of the server that evening and one can’t log in until sometime after the other.

Just stop by the tavern and pick X up. She’ll go with Y if he asks her. Then you can be most of the way there by the time I log in.

It could be a powerful tool. Combined witzh the ability to script the behavior of a PC while in mob mode, you may even be able to reap the benefits of player created content and have your streets filled with living breathing, lovingly crafted characters.

Or the streets could be full of Drizzts speaking SMS.

There is one issue that you would need to address however. By allowing characters to craft conversations to be used by PCs in mob mode, you are essentially giving your players a license to create NPCs. This should be handled with great care.
How do you control the population of player NPCs so that the servers don’t become overwhelmed?

Do you want to limit the number of characters per account or IP address? This would open up muling and multi-boxing possibilities galore.

How do you prevent players from abusing this for the benefit of their main?

How do you maintain standards? Do you only give this ability to players who have proven themselves? To all comers?

The problems with mob mode

Last time, I extolled the virtues of mob mode. Now imagine the following scenario. Your character is walking down a street and bumps into a friend. This other PC is one that your character has spent a lot of time running with and they know each other well. Naturally, your PC greets him/her and gets the following response:

…

That is an immersion breaker right there. There is an inherent problem with NPCs communicating with player controlled characters. Generally speaking, you have two options. You can use canned conversations, or go the chatbot route. Canned conversations are of course canned and mostly suited to utility NPCs; quest givers and merchants. Chatbots have difficulty with context and are prone to sounding deranged. Both of these break immersion.

There is another issue with mob mode raids/adventures. If the player assigns the PC to a friend as a pet, the owning player is no longer in charge and the temporary controller is. What if the temporary controller takes the character somewhere that the character would not willingly go? What if the temporary controller engages in forced RP with the character? How much control is ceded to the temporary controller? What happens when the temporary controller asks the PC to do something that the owning player does not approve of? How do you define the rules for handling such situations?

Mob Mode

Something came up tangentially in a discussion on the MMORPGMaker.com forums the other day. In the context of trying to make “empty” (i.e. too large for the current playerbase) worlds feel less empty, a poster suggested:

if characters remain in the game after the player logs out, the world won’t feel so empty…sigh. i beat this drum too often.

This is something that I have long considered something that is – if not exactly a holy grail – at the very least potentially very desirable and certainly worth a try. Mike Walters and I refer to this as “mob mode”. Essentially, it means turning control of a PC over to the AI when logging out. There are a number of situations where this can be useful:

Long raids/dungeon crawls/adventure sessions

Everyone has had the situation where the event is not over, but they have to go take care of real life. Normally, this is fudged with a bit of forced roleplay where the PC in question somehow gets split from the group. If a player could assign her PC as a pet to a fellow player, then that PC will still be around and participating; at least in combat if not actively in the RP. The player could review the IC chat logs later.

The flip side of this is that if a player can’t log in before the others in the group already set off, his character could already tag along.

Really grindy tasks

Designers and admins want a mechanism to control how long a character has been around. One mechanism is to force the player to invest a certain number of hours of playing the character before that character can acquire a given amount of avatar capital. You don’t want the character’s character sheet reading “epic” when that character is still a low status nobody. In the case of RP, this takes time. This often suggests either “time deferred” avatar capital (e.g. daily or weekly limits on XP) or steep grinds.

The problem with the first is that it encourages campfire roleplay where the characters mostly just sit around and talk. The problem with the second is that players don’t like to grind. Actually, I’ll take that back. Many achiever types don’t mind grinding or at least tolerate it. However since the immersion motive of players does not appear to correlate with the achievement motive, you can’t say that roleplayers like to grind. Some may. Others won’t.

If characters are always in-world, even when not being actively played, the designer is free to create “grindy” tasks that the characters can be assigned to during downtime. Such things as crafting, learning spells, engineering new starship designs, practicing martial moves, etc. could easily be give onerous real life time requirements. Crafting the sword of uberness could require 100 hours of smithing work, broken up in several steps. The player could fit it in along with other downtime tasks such as training and travelling; leaving the online time to adventuring and roleplaying.

On the surface, this strategy seems to have much to offer. Next time, I’ll examine some of the potential probles and pitfalls of a mob mode paradigm.