In the World, But Not Of It

World of Warcraft forum-hounds have recently been chewing over the difficult case of one "Baxter", who has been desperately appealing his sentence of virtual execution for the apparent crime of levitating into forbidden places. The discussion (in one main thread and several other related ones) has mostly centered on various competing ideas about virtual jurisprudence and due process, which touch on my established interest in the "MMOG state".

But I think there's another issue here that takes us away from the official forum thrashing about Baxter's guilt or innocence to the theory and practice of MMOG design. Namely, what's the best way to implement the long-term addition of new geographies and content to a MMOG world?

Blizzard has opted to incarnate or add a tremendous amount of their future or unfinished content within the present gameworld. It's very easy to spot where future instanced dungeons are intended to be. Even before recent announcements about content in development, most players could just simply recognize intuitively that Dire Maul and Deadwind Pass were planned instances. It's easy to see other such areas: Oneiros in Feralas is another I've spotted: an area with high-level monsters and no apparent point to it. The imposing Shadow Portal in Blasted Lands is so obviously a future site for content that it tends to generate amusing urban legends among players about what might be required to access it (the favorite scenario is "hundreds of players gathered before the portal" or "a single key that one player in the game can have", the likely scenario is what one player dryly summed up as "a credit card to purchase the expansion pack").

WoW players have been talking about places on the map that can be seen on gryphon flights but not conventionally accessed, such as the cliffside farm below Ironforge or the "Dun Morogh airport" (possibly one of the areas that leads to the detection of levitation-hack offenses) . Some explorers have reported swimming around southern Kalimdor and coming across a giant hole in the world (and being told not to go back there by GMs). Other players have talked about the use of the game-mechanics involved in being a ghost to get to places that cannot be accessed otherwise. You can visit the kidnapped king of Stormwind in the game, but nothing happens: he's incarnated in the world, but his story has yet to be made active.

So World of Warcraft designed a capacious world brimming over with signs and portents of its eventual growth, but also a quest system that tends to define fairly specifically where one should be at any given time in the existence of a character. There aren't "intentional" Easter eggs hidden on the very large map, rewards for explorers. In fact, there may be penalties for exploration, depending on whom you believe in the unreliable world of forum chatter.

A heavily zone-dependent MMOG can add content behind zone walls: there's no need to concretely place future content development visibly within the gameworld. Other MMOGs have simply used the addition of islands off a non-zoned landscape for new content, as with the original Asheron's Call.

Some of this is a technical question about how the form of world development and the use of zoning requires or does not require a world which is developed in one great integral moment. World of Warcraft also has a backstory that spins off a geography mapped initially another, different sort of game, the RTS Warcraft III and its expansion pack. Some licensed or derivative MMOGs don't have a cartographic constraint of that kind: the Star Wars films only left viewers with the vaguest idea of the map of Tatooine. Others will have the same prior constraint as World of Warcraft: surely Middle-Earth Online is going to have to deal with players who do their best to travel to Far Harad and so on, to places named, mapped but largely undescribed by the original author.

So I'm curious first about the technical questions: how should a development team plan for and place future content in a MMOG world? But also the aesthetic or creative ones: what does it do to the experience of a virtual world to fill it with the signs and portents of things to come? In a game where the mechanics guide you patiently from one step to the next, is it more exciting or frustrating to find something that resembles the physical, geographical architecture of a questing place but so far lacks the little yellow exclamation points over NPC heads that make a WoW place really come to life? Should MMOG designers construct game fictions about new content that claims that content has been there all along? (That's the way City of Heroes does it, generally: Peregrine Island was always there, it's just that it was waiting for an entrepreneur to open his ferry boat to it.) Should there be a narrative addition that gives the creation of new places a matching in-game fiction? (A walled-off cavern opened by landslide, a ruin rediscovered, a dimension newly accessed, a facility newly built by an NPC faction.)

Comments

[David Ely]

1.

I think it ends up hurting Blizzard in many cases. They clearly have the entire storyline mapped in their collective heads, but we don't have access to it. We know that Arthas is holed up somewhere north, and the area is on the map, but we can't get there. They've started storylines about the Silthid, but when you go to Silthius there's nothing there to do. It all calls attention to the fact that the game isn't finished. It taunts the players who have gotten through most of the other content.

Is it worse to know a little bit about future content that you can't enjoy, or to not know about it?

The problem is that, if they removed all hints of that content from the game prior to its release, they couldn't build it into current storylines. The design of the game is very much built so that you're in a world with lots going on. You're usually working through three or four quest lines at once, and as you approach level 60 these lines get longer and longer. Currently you can start a set of quests, and sometimes they'll dead end at a point where the next step hasn't been released yet. The way it is now might be frustrating because you really want to move on with the story, but it might end up being better than finishing everything you have and then having stories start up from nowhere with zero momentum once the new content patch comes in.

But still, it certainly does serve as a reminder to the fact that you're playing an unfinished game. I guess that's part of the point with MMO's, but it only works in their favor if they get new content out quickly without waiting months on end for patches.

[Andres Ferraro]

2.

I suppose if I were to levitate all the way to the White House, the secret service might also want a pice of me... For a biopsy... Might have to scrape the walls and filter out the lead for that one, though. :)

[Biggles]

3.

I think this is a good thing when done propperly. The trick is to provide an effective and believable way to keep players out of your construction site. I love the idea of CoH's new PvP arena being preluded by an in-game construction site, with 'coming soon' banners and idle builders wandering around. The story of the portal in WoW sounds good too. Since both of these explanations are in keeping with the world, they are acceptable and actually add to the world (eg, rumours surrounding the portal).

What would be very cool would be if someone made a planescape-esque take on this and had a world which actually was artificial. Ie when you end up in somewhere you shouldn't be, you saw, say, midgets running around building the world, or giant cogs or something (eg, dark city, the truman show, the matrix (though there is a game for it coming out soon, it doesn't seem to have this kind of imagination going into it)).

[Nick Cassidy]

4.

The question of how to draw the illusion of upcoming content without getting smacked over the head with it seems to be plaguing the dev team. And I agree that conjuring up locations out of thin air is no solution. We're witnessing a peculiar situation that hasn't got much better since launch. I can recall twice in particular during alpha where a GM had stopped me from entering Black Rock Depths for fear of reprimand or avatar execution. Interestingly enough, this comes from a company that has a thick history of creating easter eggs.

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

5.

The thread doesn't appear to available anymore, which begs the question: can you get justice if the world-owner controls all major communication channels? Not so much a problem for the hardcore, but for a casual game it could actually become a consumer's rights issue, IMO.

A tiny fraction (with videos) are available on huntersofazeroth.com

[Flatfingers]

6.

I wonder how much of the solution depends on understanding the different ways that different people react to the word "unfinished."

Let's say you plop something down in the game world that's visible but can't be accessed, and explain it by saying that it's "unfinished content."

Some players will react negatively. They'll assume that you're lying (or, for reasons that elude me, they'll pretend to believe that you're lying) and that insist you've got content there but you're just not sharing it with them and someone else will get to it first when it opens up. These players will express frustration and anger at content described as "unfinished." For them, that word connotes limits on their action due to developer laziness or spite.

Another player who sees a thing or place that can't be accessed but which clearly is a marker for potential future content will rub her hands together in glee. "Hmm, looks like the devs have plans to make the world even more interesting -- cool!" For these players, "unfinished" has the positive connotations of "growing and improving."

Maybe the technical strategy for rolling out new content should be determined by what kind of player constitutes the majority of your player base.

--Flatfingers

P.S. I'm also a little surprised at Blizzard. They earned considerable player good will from easter eggs in their RTS games, so why come down heavy on players in their MMOG who explore for similar funny things?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

7.

Flatfingers> why come down heavy on players in their MMOG who explore for similar funny things?

As far as I can understand they appear to have made the mistake of trusting the client, then autodetect people who achieve things that shouldn't be possible assuming they are using hacks...

Unfinished is never good... Ancient locked doors and missing keys are ok. ;)

(Ah well, the forums were just down temporarily)

[RedWolf]

8.

While I find it incredibly frustrating that the kingdom of Gilneas is just behind the Greymane Wall that I can't get through (or over) because it's not finished, it would seem obvious to me that using the levitate spell to get there is an exploit. Maybe if I were a total newbie to MMORPGs, however the person in question says that he has been playing MMORPGs before and specifically UO, which also had simular problems with players getting into areas of the map that were unfinished and getting suspended or banned for it. I think that Blizzard's response has been heavy handed, I don't think the player deserved an instant ban for such a minor offense, but I'm guessing that they are trying to send a message to other players (which would explain why the thread grew so long).

[greglas]

9.

There's two severable issues here: 1) the stuff that can be seen but that doesn't make sense because it isn't integrated with the game, and 2) the dev rules and orders that prevent players from getting to that stuff, even when the means of access seems to be consistent with the game code.

Re #1 -- I agree with Biggles that you could do "unfinished" in a more interesting & entertaining way, even in a way that is consistent with the story & mythos perhaps. Maybe a shroud of glowing fog, maybe some ethereal sentries, something...

Re #2 -- To some extent, this goes back to the old "what's an exploit?" question, but I'd think that merely swimming to a certain place is not an exploit. The "don't go there because I, the GM, say so" approach is not satisfying artistically. It's kind of like an artist presenting a sculpture and telling the viewers they're only allowed to look at it from a certain angle. Freedom of movement to explore the environment, when it doesn't involve the use of extrinsic code, is something that's expected in most games.

[Timothy Burke]

10.

If you work through the entire series of threads on the particular case, you see that at least some players think the offender in this case was using a known third-party hack that included not just levitate but teleporting hacks and other hacks. If so, that's what the person was punished for. Tough to say in this case, but one should take the particulars as presented by the player with a grain of salt.

In the larger issue, though, I think it's pretty fair to say that Blizzard has at times had some pretty crude management of the exploratory drives of some of its players. The original official thread on this subject really was kind of ominous, basically, "Don't go to places that you're not supposed to be in, and if you get warned by a GM, don't go back." It's true that this same thread specified that the only bannable thing you could do vis-a-vis those places is exploit their content to level quickly or some such, but still...

[Thabor]

11.

It seems to me that they have basically made a tradeoff of high enforcement costs for trying to preserve stroy integration down the road.

There are several areas in the game that have been literally walled off either by doors or by force fields, so clearly they have the capability to manage things properly for areas where there is a proper zone/portal connection.

It sounds like the real issue for them is large open areas that have yet to be filled in. They made a committment to creating a large and mostly continuous world and this is one of the trade offs.

My expectation would be that they intend to fill small areas in with live patches. It would be douplicated/wasted effort to create a patch to wall areas off, and then patch again to add them.

The warcraft backstory would seem to allow for the addition of entire new worlds behind some of the portals. I would imagine a similar approach where they fill in as much of the map as possible in a large expansion, and leave some area unfilled for live enhancements or patches.

It might not be the best way to manage customers, but one of the things I appreciate most about WoW is feeling like I'm in a world with a consistent geography, instead of in a series of disconnected rooms. As a player I'll be very grateful if they maintain that part of their vision in spite of the difficulties of managing it.

[Rich Thurman]

12.

"...As far as I can understand they appear to have made the mistake of trusting the client, then auto detect people who achieve things that shouldn't be possible assuming they are using hacks..." : Ola Fosheim Grøstad

This is actually a major concern I have with game development. There seems to be no care for security. When designing a secure system, you NEVER, EVER EVER trust the information sent to the server. Everything must be validated.

The problem here is that MMOGs need to be highly scalable, which means buying costly hardware, or passing the buck off to the client and let the client "share" the load.

Bad design breeds problems, and until the game designers get it through their heads that security should be a "feature" in their product, you are going to get meta-gamers pushing and expanding the envelope in which the game designers want to keep them in.

Rich Thurman
ex-gold farmer/meta-gamer

[AFFA]

13.

Another example: DAoC's Realms were "on top" of one another. If you fell through the floor in some places, you could end up in another Realm.

I don't have a problem with content being in the game but either not accessible or only marginally accessible. I think this is actually a sound design. It gives the developers some obvious room and directions in which to expand. I've always assumed this kind of thing, like DAoC's stacked Realms, were done for technical reasons.

However, I do have a problem with how most on-line game companies handle rule violations. They say, basically, "There are some things you shouldn't do. We aren't going to tell you what they are, but you should know them if you see them, in which case it will be too late."

I think ignorance of the law should be an excuse in these games, especially when the law could only be broken because of bugs or when the developes haven't said what the rules are. Finding a hole in the world or a new bug should get a warning. Doing it again should get the ban.

[Samantha LeCraft]

14.

AFFA said: I think ignorance of the law should be an excuse in these games, especially when the law could only be broken because of bugs or when the developes haven't said what the rules are. Finding a hole in the world or a new bug should get a warning. Doing it again should get the ban.

AFAIK, most commercial MMOs do have a policy of warning before banning, especially if the rule that was broken isn't a published rule. I know that was the policy back when I was a GM for UO, and I sounds like that is the policy with WoW's GMs as well. From the original post: Some explorers have reported swimming around southern Kalimdor and coming across a giant hole in the world (and being told not to go back there by GMs). To me, that makes it sound like players who find unfinished areas of the world are warned by a GM not to go back there, not summarily banned for their first trip out there. If someone is warned by a GM not to explore unfinished areas and they continue to do so, shouldn't they be punished? They can't claim ignorance of the law after a GM has laid it out for them.

Having been a GM, and having read on public message boards the supposed details of bannings that I was directly involved with, I tend to be more than a little suspicious of anyone claiming GM abuse. Banned players routinely lie about why they have been banned, to make themselves look better and to get more public attention paid to their "case". Not all players lie, certainly, and GMs are not in the right 100% of the time. But I'd be willing to put money on it that anyone who says they were not warned before being banned either has GM logs on their account which prove otherwise, or failed to read the rules in the first place.

Personally, I don't agree with Blizzard's policy of warning and banning people for accessing unfinished areas of the game. I don't think those areas should be blocked off in the first place. Why should they care if I go into an unpopulated area and look around? Wouldn't they prefer that players knew about and talked about unfinished areas, so that players would be excited about future content for that area?

That said, I am still very suspicious of anyone who says they were banned for their first offense of an unpublished rule.