Power To The People

Ok, I promise, this will be my last post this week on politics in-world:

Andrew Phelps, over at Corante's Got Game reports on the killing in Everquest of Kerafyrm, also known as The Sleeper. This supposedly unkillable beast was defeated by in a battle that "...lasted approximatively 3 hours and about 170-180 players from Rallos Zek's top 3 guilds were involved." The Sleeper was designed to be practically unkillable, with a mind-boggling hundred billion hitpoints.

Ok, so now tell me that political direct action (and concerted-and-centrally controlled user response from within guilds) is not a powerful, undesigned feature of these games.

What to make of this I have only the vaguest idea. But never let it be said that the people don't have power over the gods. They just need to be given the appropriate challenge.

Comments

[Bryan Allman]

1.

Hmm, I don't know whether to laugh or cry, cheer or jeer.

A little EQ background for any who may not play - Rallos Zek is one of the few fully PvP servers in EQ. It is MUCH harder to get a character to the highest levels on those servers due to many factors which are both direct and indirect consequences of the PvP, including difficulties in acquiring good equipment, difficulties in KEEPING good equipment, fewer people to group with, fewer accessible areas to "play" (work-to-level-up) in, etc.

Can anyone confirm that this is indeed the first ever on any EQ server? I thought FoH and some of the other oober guilds had killed the sleeper on various servers months ago?

Regardless of first or not, this is quite an accomplishement by the players. Multiple 200+ player guilds are present on pretty much every non-PvP server, but this level of organization and cooperation on this server is indeed impressive. I liken running a guild (or organizing a major raid) on a non-PvP server to trying to herd cats. I think doing the same on a PvP server must be more like trying to herd rabid tasmanian devils.

As for Sony/Verant, well, I can't think of a single instance in the entire history of EQ when their first response to an unforseen situation hasn't been excessively draconian and negative, well beyond even the most conservative and prudently cautious approach that might be reasonably justified. Not a one. Ever. They have all the instincts (and tact) of a really bad and extremely insecure 15-yr old PnP game master who insists the players play out his adventure the way he designed it. And yet, this time they reversed themselves and at least attempted to correct their mistake (while never publicly admitting to it or apologizing for it?) in less than 24 hours, which may well set a new record for them.

So should they be castigated for screwing up yet again, or congratulated for trying to correct an obvious mistake as quickly as possible?

[Chris Anderson]

2.

There were two versions of the Sleeper. The first hit for 2000pts, the second for 7000. There were other differences as well.

FOH woke Kerafym for the first time on Veeshan, revealing a broken script and unfinished model. After that, Kerafym was revamped and one by one the rest of the servers woke him and died. Nobody got him below 99% health, and most were just happy to watch the script play out. Nobody believed that the Sleeper was killable.

A Korean server supposedly killed Kerafym v1 some time ago, but that claim has many doubters.

The situation on Rallos Zek is unique for many reasons:

1. Kerafym was still around. Most servers woke him to deny access to the loot tables of Sleepers Tomb, since once Kerafym woke, the loot tables changed significantly. RZ put together a coalition of guilds that promised retribution to any guild that woke him. Given that it's a pvp server, their threat was real.

2. Three guilds were able to band together and coordinate 150+ players in a raid environment. That level of cooperation and organization is incredible: raids of 50-70 people often break down because of lack of organization.

3. It was thrown together fairly quickly. My opinion is that the timing of this attempt was driven by the announcement by SOE of character transfers with gear to any other server... that means that whole guilds can move to another server and not have to re-equip themselves. It was only a matter of time before a guild went to RZ for the express purpose of waking Kerafym. The previous threat by the top 3 guilds was impotent because they could just move back once they were done.

4. Their strategy involved numerous mass deaths by melee characters ... even with 96% rezzes available, you're talking significant xp loss. Most people aren't willing to throw away that much time and effort to kill one mob.

All in all, it was an impressive achievement. I saw entire guilds stop their raids mid-stream, just to sit down and listen to the play by play over the serverwide channels. Kudos to RZ.

[Dan Hunter]

3.

Could someone, ANYONE, please start doing for these gaming worlds what The Alphaville Herald is doing for TSO? Killing Kerafym is clearly an important aspect of the social history of EQ, RZ is going to get massive social props for putting it together, whole guilds stopped to watch/listen to it, etc etc. Yet it essentially didn't happen, because no-one is writing it down in an accessible form. (Oh, and I don't consider Stratics and the like to count here)

Game worlds seems to operate in a pre-historical era where the social environment is not considered important enough to document. In years to come the seminal events in important worlds will be the subject of myth and legend, and not history. This may appeal to the mediaeval theme of most of these worlds, but it is a mistake. We'll come to regret this.

[Cory Ondrejka]

4.

Just to put this accomplishment in numerical terms for the geeks in the audience:

(100 billion hp)/(3 hours) * (1 hour/3600 seconds) = 9,259,259 hp/second

(9,259,259 hp/s) / (180 players) = 51,440 hp per second per player

This seems like a pretty amazing net rate of damage to me since killing those first snakes took me around a minute for a damage rate of:

10 hp/60 s = 0.16 hp per sec per player

So their rate of damage is about 300,000 times greater than a newb.

[Dan Hunter]

5.

Cory: "Just to put this accomplishment in numerical terms for the geeks in the audience"

What I like about this post is the thought that there might actually be non-geeks in this audience...

[Dave Rickey]

6.

There used to be a lot of "Community News" oriented sites around, but the great Dot-Com shakeout and banner drought seems to have killed off most of the little ones. All that's left is the Vault, Stratics, and Warcry, and they tend to be more game oriented than community events.

--Dave

[Richard Bartle]

7.

Dan Hunter>Ok, so now tell me that political direct action (and concerted-and-centrally controlled user response from within guilds) is not a powerful, undesigned feature of these games.

I won't tell you it isn't one in EQ, but I will tell you that it isn't one in "these games". Please will you stop generalising from what EQ's designers designed and what other VW designers design!

In MUD1, I had a dragon. The dragon was the most powerful mobile in The Land. If you went up against it in a fight, you lost. If ten of you went up against it, you lost. If every player in the game went up against it, they all lost.

However, I made it so it was killable. I did this deliberately in the hope that players might find a way to kill it. Maybe they would do so, maybe they wouldn't, but the point was that it was a design intent that once players figured out they could slightly dent the dragon's hide they'd work together to figure out how to dent it some more. In other words, the possibility of direct action was a deliberately encouraged by the design - a "design feature" of the kind you suggest is "undesigned".

Did the players ever kill the dragon? Yes, they did: they set up a teleport bridge between where they entered the virtual world and where the dragon was in combat. When their character was killed, they came straight back in with a level 1 newbie, used the teleport bridge to get to the dragon, and waded back into the fray. So long as at all times there was at least one player fighting the dragon, it couldn't escape. Eventually, after a long and epic battle, they brought it down.

OK, so there weren't 180 players (more like 20) and it didn't take them 3 hours (more like 1), but they felt just as glorious and empowered as did the victors over The Sleeper, only they did it 15 years earlier.

Just because a designer designs something to be "practically unkillable", that doesn't mean that they don't want it to be killed, nor that they would be unhappy if it were. The biggest thrill for a designer is when players use the options available to them in the context of the world to do something special that the designer hadn't anticipated.

You can put whatever political spin you want on player power, and call anything that the virtual world developers do to react to this the result of "democracy", but it's basically just appealing to the gods. If the gods don't listen, either you go appeal to some other gods of some other world who do listen, or you stay because the gods ARE the world and if you accept one you have to accept the other.

Richard

[Douglas Galbi]

8.

Dan: But never let it be said that the people don't have power over the gods. They just need to be given the appropriate challenge.

Richard: If the gods don't listen, either you go appeal to some other gods of some other world who do listen, or you stay because the gods ARE the world and if you accept one you have to accept the other.

Agency doesn't have to play out between "power over the gods" and "the gods ARE the world." It's easy to image worlds in which the gods intentionally make players in the image of gods. What that means in specifics is of course up to the gods, but surely such an intention would indicate that the gods themselves don't consider themselves to be the world. Moreover, if the gods create in this way, then "power over the gods" is bit like trying to jump by pulling up one's hair.

[Cory Ondrejka]

9.

LOL. I meant "math geeks" as a separate branch in the geek family tree :-)!

Also, as someone who isn't a regular EQ player I am curious whether this is a reasonable rate of damage for level 65 players or whether there were hacks/cheats/tricks used. Anybody know?

[Ian McGee]

10.

To Bryan's point about "Sony" seemingly reversing itself...

You're seeing the difference between a 20 year-old (guessing) GM stressing over a game-first event likely during off-hours, vs. the hopefully reasoned and argued debate by experienced senior staff about how to handle it.

We should *expect* such differences to arise in new situations. If Sony does a good job there won't be a problem the next time. If it ever occurs again that is...

[DivineShadow]

11.

"The biggest thrill for a designer is when players use the options available to them in the context of the world to do something special that the designer hadn't anticipated."

Watching emergent behavior as it takes form is thrilling, I bet. But your description of actions (except for the thrilling bit) can also be stated of bugs in the code. This is a grey area: Second-guessing the intent of the overlords of the game and staying on their good side while applying creativity and resourcefulness to problem-solving.

Many people have and continue to apply creativity and resourcefulness to bring about epic moments in virtual worlds, like Lord British's famous death at the hands of a beta-tester. Sure, this was a bug, the player used a combination of factors (none of them fiction-breaking, like hacking the server) to bring about this event. At the time this was considered an exploit and the player penalized. What is the rationale? It was an unforseen emergent bahavior of the system in action. Having the unilateral power to penalize customers for not being mind-readers is not helping to lubricate the social wheels that maintain it all going - more like dumping sand on them; and it only serves to project an image of a whymsical decision-making process where the consumer can only feel 'expendable' - With the only options available of putting up or leaving, and sometimes even that decision being made for them.

[Ren]

12.

>Ok, so now tell me that political direct action (and concerted-and-centrally controlled user response from within guilds) is not a powerful, undesigned feature of these games.

Taking this statement at first glance I’m not sure who IS telling you this.

Slightly more analytically I think I would contend that the action that you site it not a political action in the context that we tend to debate here, I could be wrong but I did not think that the players were making some meta-statement about game design decision, rather they are taking very interesting in-game \ in-narrative actions.

Moreover (as Divine as just noted) I don’t think that these type of actions are ‘undesigned’ in so much as emergent social behaviour is one of the design goals of virtual worlds.

Ren
www,renreynolds.com

[Richard Bartle]

13.

Divine Shadow>But your description of actions (except for the thrilling bit) can also be stated of bugs in the code. This is a grey area

It is, but there's a simple test that a designer can perform to determine the difference. If you don't want it to happen again, it's a bug; if you don't mind, it's a feature. Unfortunately, since you didn't plan on its happening at all, you can only decide which after the event...

Richard

[Richard Bartle]

14.

Douglas Galbi>It's easy to image worlds in which the gods intentionally make players in the image of gods. What that means in specifics is of course up to the gods, but surely such an intention would indicate that the gods themselves don't consider themselves to be the world.

This is an interesting point. Here's a quote from my book (paraphrasing Kevin Kelly, who makes the same point in his book "Out of Control"):

"The ultimate 'god game' would be a vast world, set into motion with a few well-chosen
rules and populated by PCs and autonomous, AI-driven NPCs. Time would pass, relationships
and interrelationships would form and tangle. All entities — PCs and NPCs — would alter their world, physically and socially, until it evolved into something quite different from how it started. At that point, the god who created it /descends into it/."

If the gods intentionally "create" players as a simulacrum of themselves, giving those players the (potential) ability to shape the virtual world to the same extent that the gods have, then yes, this would indeed be different. I'd even go so far as to say that it's desirable. In fact, I do:

'The creator has to pass control to the created. The designer — whether you or [the gods] — must "let go to win".'

For virtual world designers, creating a virtual world is a journey of the self (in the same way that for players, playing is a journey of the self). When the players themselves become designers, that's where the original designer's journey ends (and a thousand new ones begin).

Richard

[ren]

15.

Wow terranova is turing out to be a fantastic place for appropriating great phrases and terms:

Richard> that's where the original designer's journey ends (and a thousand new ones begin)

Consider that one _stolen_

ren
www.renreynolds.com

[Richard Bartle]

16.

Ren>Consider that one _stolen_

You mean I don't retain my IP for creations on TerraNova?

Damn, I should have read the EULA!

Richard

[Tek]

17.

Richard>You mean I don't retain my IP for creations on TerraNova?

Guess that means I won't be posting any of my acclaimed ASCII art. My style has been described as a mix between Renoir and Pollock.

Anyways, I think the topic at hand here can lead to the question, "how responsible are developers for the integrity of their code?" Which I use mainly a generalization that includes "what bugs are players allowed to abuse?" Is this something that has a dogmatic answer? Or do most consider it needing case-by-case evaluation (determining after-the-fact whether or not a specific exploit is illegal)? I think EULAs often cover some of this, but they would not in the "Sleeper" case.

[ren]

18.

>Damn, I should have read the EULA!

Good point - what is terranova's EULA ?

ren
www.renreynolds.com

[Bryan Allman]

19.

>You're seeing the difference between a 20 year-old (guessing) GM stressing over a game-first event likely during off-hours, vs. the hopefully reasoned and argued debate by experienced senior staff about how to handle it.

That 20 year-old GM did not freak out in a vaccuum. He works in an environment where the culture of distrust of the players is endemic (I think the historical record speaks for itself there?), where the default action has ALWAYS been restrictive (even or especially by the "experienced senior staff") and where it literally takes an emergency meeting of senior staff with somebody putting his job on the line to "allow" the players to "get away" with something the designers did not specifically want or anticipate. That novice off-shift GM did EXACTLY what his superiors, through their past decisions and actions if not actual written policies, indicated he should do. Excusing the company by blaming the junior employee is completely bogus. On the other hand, that particular corporate culture IS changing (for the better IMHO), as witnessed by the quick reversal.

As for Ren's statement that "emergent social behaviour is one of the design goals of virtual worlds" my first response was "Hogwash!". Then I reread it a couple dozen times and came to the conclusion that it is probably accurate for some designers of some games some of the time but generally only in the narrowest possible interpretation. And always subject to the devs reserving the right to change their minds (rightly or wrongly) to disallow unexpected behavior that they don't like (from the facist state example in another thread, to the newbie-unfriendly Lord of the Flies scenario of early UO days, to downright illegal or immoral behaviors).

Not to pick nits, but:

"emergent" - by definition doesn't this eliminate anything deliberately hard-coded in?

"social" - as in, limited exclusively to interactions between players, but NOT to include things they do to "beat" or "abuse" the game?

It seems like, in every case I can think of, the desire to seed, promote or even just passively allow emergent social behavior ends the moment that behavior crosses the boundary of chat-room "talk" to incorporating game mechanics. By the way, IMNSHO this is generally a good thing when it comes to preventing players from adversely affecting the experience of other players in ways they did not specifically opt-in for. My objection comes when devs throw their teen-style hissy fits when players "beat" the game in ways they didn't expect.

It seems like a couple of should-be-obvious red flags need to be thrown up every time game developers start waxing philosophical about the glorious future of emergent behavior. Very few combinations of emergent behaviors actually result in stable and self-sustaining systems. Even fewer of those are going to be particularly "fun" for all or even most of the participants, yet those systems cannot remain stable without the continued presence of those not-having-fun participants. And lastly, designing for unpredictable emergent behaviors by no means absolves the developer from the responsibility of designing to prevent known and easily predicted undesireable behaviors!

[Slyfeind]

20.

Minor nitpick, but Rainz (the assassin to Lord British in UO's beta) had been disruptive throughout the entire beta test, which warranted his banning. I wouldn't necessarily consider him killing off Lord British as the sole cause.