Seth Sivak of gametruth.org reminds us that Matrix Online has been launched, and points us to what might be a unique feature or might be just dressed-up GM'ing: Actors who will play out narrative sequences live. While I can almost hear the eyes of the MUD-Dev-ers rolling, Seth asks some good questions about this.
Seth writes:
"I find it interesting that no one has mentioned much about Matrix Online since it
launched. I realize it is still early but I found this particularly fascinating:
"Since the close of the beta, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment announced
that it has employed a troupe of 20-odd people whose job it will be to enact
narrative scenarios in The Matrix Online live. These people will assume the
roles of popular characters, interact with players, and generally move the
stories in ways that only live 'actors' can." - Gamespy.com
I think this idea of hiring actors to roleplay in games is very interesting. I
know this idea is not very new but the way it is implemented seems a bit
radical. This topic brought many questions into my head and I wondered if the
Terra Nova community had any thoughts or answers.
The obvious question first: Can this approach work? Will it make the game more
realistic or beleivable?
Some other thoughts are:
What would be the fallout if this backfires?
How does this compare to the more traditional way of moving a story forward by
having an "event"?
Is this strategy effective considering an actor can only interact with a select
few players?
Could this idea be expanded to make a Virtual World more real? How far could it
or should it go?"
I've been in MxO since its later beta days, and while the game is attempting some nice things, it has so many problems and difficulties that it'll be miracle if it survives to 2006. WBI/Monolith bought the hardware for 20 server clusters, but only six are open, and not all those are full. The servers stutter and stagger regularly, updates are almost daily, basic features (like "/emote" commands or an ability to petition a GM for help) are missing, bugs roam like herds of pre-colonial buffalo, while the game itself is a slow, tortuous grind-fest of levelling up.
In this kind of environment, whatever modest success the "live NPCs" might accomplish is likely to be completely drowned out. Furthermore, a good number of those who currently play are Matrix fans, there for the story and plot advancement. Any sighting of Morpheus, Niobe, or Lock becomes a ripple in the fabric of the universe as guilds from all three factions converge on the spot, each member desperate for a few moments of glory as the person who talked with/helped/hurt/killed the famous personage.
When players finally discover that there are just too many of them and not enough "live NPC" people for real interaction opportunities, what little reason they still had to stay will evaporate. Even if they do have a satisfying experience, I can't see how such fleeting contacts will truly drive the game.
Intricate, long-term storylines didn't save AC2. Superlative scripts and voice-acting on numerous plotlines didn't save EQ2 from being trounced by WoW. I don't see how less than two dozen actors can rescue MxO from the dubious level achieved by the last two Matrix movies.
Posted by: Arnold Hendrick | Apr 05, 2005 at 00:44
I believe that the live-actor approach has potential. Obviously, the limited contact between the actors and the public could be a significant problem. I can only hope that this was realized before implementation and accounted for. If used well, I could see people seeking out the key figures. If the game rewarded both contact and spreading the news, an exciting new dimension of the game could develop, especially among fervent players.
Actually, I am surprised that more games do not reward faithfulness with interesting player opportunities. How fun would it be to get to become an agent for a bit in the Matrix? The paying players themselves should be used to act out key roles. It would be a great way to encourage role-playing over power-playing: rewarding the ardent faithful.
Posted by: Matthew | Apr 05, 2005 at 00:50
The method of block-quoting used here is totally broken in Opera 7.x for Windows.
FYI!
=darwin
Posted by: Darwin | Apr 05, 2005 at 01:39
Text-MUDs seem to get away with live actors, although I think the actors are more often trusted players than employees. Skotos has storytelling, and some other MUDs have staff that occasionally play deities and rulers.
As for MMORPGs...
- Uru Live tried actors, and was cancelled in beta, although the cancelling probably wasn't due to their live actors.
- Wish had GMs running around and creating custom content. I don't know if they had live actors, but the concept is fincancially similar. They were cancelled in beta.
- Does this bode well for the matrix online?
I'll put forth a hypothesis that others can tear down or support...
Content creation, such as the content in WoW or EQII, is a cost that's mostly independent of the number of players. It cost Blizzard $N million to produce WoW. If they only attracted 100K players they'd need to get $N/100K from each player before making a profit. (Ignoring server, network, and CS costs, which are a per-player per-month cost of about $5... I think.) If they attracted 1M players they'd need to get $N/1M from each player to make a profit. At 10M players it's pure profit after the first week of play. Thus, large companies like products with large initial costs and low per-user per-month costs. The large initial costs reduce the potential competitors, and the lower overhead allows large companies to take advantage of their marketing might.
The cost of actors or Wish-like GMs is proportionate to the number of users. Small companies have a tremendous advantage when it comes to hiring actors/GMs because they have such a huge disadvantage when trying to create so much content like WoW. (If that makes sense.) Furthermore, actors/GMs are less likely to tread on each other's actions in a small world because there are fewer of them. The smallest virtual worlds, pen-and-paper D&D campaigns, have 1 actor (the DM) for every 4-6 players, and there are probably 100K such worlds in the US alone.
There are only a handful of worlds the size of WoW. WoW can't hire 250K GM's for its world, and pen-and-paper DMs can't produce a world as large as WoW.
Posted by: Mike Rozak | Apr 05, 2005 at 01:59
Ultima Online struggled trying to properly implement this sort of content.
"GM Events" were quite common. Eventually they became "Seer" events as the technical support was separated from the providing of in game fiction. Players still called them GM Events.
The direct effects of GM events are practically non-existent. It is not just that only a small subset of your playerbase can attend. It is also that it will tend to be the *same* small subset that attends.
The next problem is that in MMORPGs, unlike smaller text muds, the lines of communication between subgroups are practically non-existent. You don't just have a fractured community. You have hundreds, or even thousands, of completely disjoint groups of players. This means the average player won't even find out about those events.
We thus get the paradox: Many in-game events going on, but the average player claiming they don't exist.
However, I'll point out that the *indirect* effects of ingame events are very important! I really believe it is important to build a history to these worlds. This is an easy way to do it. The shards of Ultima Online all diverged as each one had GMs doing different things. Because GMs did not clean up after events, strange artifacts would be left behind. Why is there a golden anvil by the waterfall on Lake Superior's shard?
This builds history. The world changes (rather than just the characters) and it changes as result of actions in world (rather than official expansion packs or cross shard fiat).
Thus, I do not think hiring actors is a good thing, as acting isn't what is important. It is more important to have live event teams *changing their world* along their directions. Hiring scripters. And hiring scripters *per world instance*.
Of course, this all being said, the numbers suggest that the players don't want worlds. They want games. And they want their game to have been the same as everyone else's game.
- Brask Mumei
Posted by: Brask Mumei | Apr 05, 2005 at 03:43
Key charismatic leaders always have a major effect in world events. I don't see why this would not hold true for online worlds.
The key is who these "live" actors are, whether they are charismatic, and how they are used. They have to use the media.
For example, in an attempt to wake the duped people of the Matrix, Neo hijacks the in-world TV broadcasts for a key speech while accepting phone-ins from jacked-in avators of different servers.
This media event, hard to duplicate in real-life, would generate quite a buzz. If they can get Mr. Reeves to do a guest appearance as Neo, the buzz generated will have a very good ROI.
Frank
Posted by: magicback | Apr 05, 2005 at 04:00
Keep in mind that Star Wars Galaxies has employed digiteers since its release in summer 2003. However, this was a MUCH underused feature and only recently you see more appearances of Leia, Vader, Han Solo, Boba Fett etc. (both in a scripted passive event form and in true live events were a digiteer controls the actions and reacts to the players around him). The SWG Event Team is the one that has control over these events and badges are awarded for attending such events.
Posted by: Erillion | Apr 05, 2005 at 04:03
I agree with many of the points brought up so far. I think that these "GM Events" can add greatly to an MMORPG. I know that in WoW that is an outcry for new content and things to do because so many characters have reached the endgame. I would think that hiring actors to hold some events would distract these high level players and would most likely be much cheaper then producing a new dungeon.
I think that these events really benefit the more hardcore players. The arguement has been made that these events will most likely only be attended by the players that are on the most. I think these diehard players are the ones that are the most critical about lack of content and probably the most vocal on the community forums. Therefore it makes sense that they would get a chance to take part in these events.
If they were to hold a few scripted "Events" a month it would add a large amount of content to any Game World (and be pretty cheap I would think). There would be a buzz about it and I think it would make the game feel more like a community. I don't think you need actual actors, and I like the idea of letting a few of the more well known diehard players play the rolls.
Posted by: Seth Sivak | Apr 05, 2005 at 10:32
Acknowledging all of the aforementioned difficulties of sustaining live actors in a MMO, I think this is something that is worth figuring out in the long run. I've had a lot of great experiences with groups of folks in MMOs, but by far, the most memorable have not been the big dragon raids--the most memorable have been constructed-events (mostly player-based) that involve and immerse.
Because of the multi-server difficulty of MMOs, most developers seem to default (as SWG) to having a small staff of actors that do a few small events here and there. Events are rare, and short, and don't really add a ton to the world experience. After all, those GM-played characters don't drop "phat loot", nor are they around long enough to form any sort of meaningful relationship to the playerbase.
The approach I am very eager to see tried is closer to what TMO is trying -- allowing the actors to play the same character persistently over a period of time, moving events and even dangling the possibility that players can form relationships with them. It is, of course, impractical to promise relationship with notable characters, but the dangling of the potential may be enough to create the illusion of attachment to the world.
I would much prefer to see, for example, a king who held audience every evening a week on a server, consistenly interacting with players. Or, a bartender who, for the right price, could offer special beverages or trinkets, or potentially even some quests normally unavailable. Or, imagine if the head of the assassin's guild actually began stirring up some plots and subterfuge against some persona also played by a GM on the other side?
Again, my preference would be to see the devs have a few full-time staff (ideally each server...but we know that won't happen) who could play a few notable characters persistently over time, creating the reputation that those characters can be interacted with or watched. Sure, at first they'll be mobbed, creating masses of players there to see the spectacle. But, as the newness wears off, I think you can fall into stride with consistent presence and do what the other posters here have mentioned--create the impression of a world with which one can interact, where NPCs are more than just furniture.
Posted by: Jythri | Apr 05, 2005 at 11:10
The primary problem with events is that they don't tend to scale well. For example, if you have a digital actor spend and hour providing a great experience for 20 people in World of Warcraft, there's 1499980 Warcraft Customers that never were touched by the experience. These other customers will only get more and more frustrated as time passes as they percieve themselves being excluded.
Obviously, smaller games have an easier time reaching more customers, but most smaller games don't have the revenue to keep more than a couple of events people on staff. Larger games can hire more events staff, but an events staff is a delicate thing -- you're talking about super-powered accounts giving away exciting experiences and cool loot, and it's hard to avoid cries of favoritism and cheating. And sometimes, the people making this claim will be right.
Over time, events staff are urged to perform more global events that touch more people. This is why most events in most MMOs devolve into 'spawn a whole bunch of monsters and kill them' -- it's the only way that most games have that allow you to provide fun for 200 people instead of 10. If their reach is still unsatisfactory, then usually events teams are among the first to suffer when the bean-counters look for ways to lower their monthly costs.
It's a shame, really, since good events are among the most compelling gameplay events in any MMO.
Sure, at first they'll be mobbed, creating masses of players there to see the spectacle. But, as the newness wears off
The problem is that the newness doesn't wear off. You're talking about the gods dallying around with mortals. You're talking about agents of change in worlds that are otherwise too static. Leaving an area with an Events person in it is kind of like turning off the TV right after a major news event like a president being assassinated - people become afraid that they'll miss something earthshattering.
Posted by: Damion Schubert | Apr 05, 2005 at 11:32
As I mentioned over at a similar thread on Grand Text Auto -- http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2005/03/25/interactive-drama-in-matrix-online/ -- the first Asheron's Call pulled this off fairly successfully, especially in their first year story-arc. The raids of the Shadow Captains, the first appearances of Asheron and Bael'Zharon, and other episodes remained one of the 'favorite' moments for many players - even those who weren't present.
Posted by: Jason | Apr 05, 2005 at 11:44
I wonder: Is the skepticism over actor/GM events due to these things being apparently random occurrences that that have no bearing on the "history" of a virtual world?
Most of these events are either an actor or staffer inhabiting a well-known NPC, or a planned drop (usually temporary) of various art/NPC assets. They're fun for those who happen to be there, and they get talked about for a short while... and that's it.
Where's the integration of these events into a larger storyline?
In fact, to ask the larger question: Where are the grand, sweeping storylines in these worlds at all?
Where are the professional writers who collaborate with game designers before the game is released and during its lifespan? Where's the planning for a coherent sequence of meaningful events in the game world, within which individual events (whether scripted or live) help tell the larger story?
There may be smaller worlds whose creators actually have a plot in mind before they start cranking out code, and whose worlds change over time as the next act in that grand plot is exposed. Why don't the big players do this?
The larger persistent worlds aren't just persistent; they're static. When players complain, "Nothing ever happens!" this is what they're talking about -- every day looks just like the previous day. (This is also why players regularly ask for seasonal weather effects.)
The only meaningful story-based change that ever happens seems to be a bit of story invented in five minutes to explain why some new expansion pack got dropped into the game world.
Isn't that backwards? Why is the story being invented to explain the expansion, rather than the expansion being added as a planned stage in the telling over time of a story?
When developers build worlds as tools for telling stories, and use actor/GM events as another of those story-telling tools so that they actually have some purpose beyond just happening, then there'll be value in them. Until then, they're just handwaving from the Marketing department.
--Flatfingers
Posted by: Flatfingers | Apr 05, 2005 at 12:26
>> In fact, to ask the larger question: Where are the grand, sweeping storylines in these worlds at all? -- Flatfingers
Each story arc in Asheron's Call generally averaged a year in length, with an update each month that introduced new dungeons (several of which were directly related to the current arc), new items, and additional features (like interface improvements, balancing measures, etc.). The stories tended to be quite epic in scope, with a variety of minitales incorporated throughout. These were downloads, free of charge (beyond the normal subscription cost).
Posted by: Jason | Apr 05, 2005 at 12:33
I've thought about the idea of actors as missionaries. There's a theory of culture (coordination game theory, for those scoring at home) that suggests there's a strong path dependence in the way societies develop expectations of behavior. When an American university is founded, its school colors can be anything. But once that first generation chooses Red, all future generations are bound to that color. Now, in RL, we don't often get to talk about the foundation of a new society. In cyberspace, we do. How liberating! We actually have a Year 0, a day when there is no history! And on that day, I would HEAVILY use actors to seed the social environment:
- to roleplay
- to be kind and helpful
- to admonish griefers
- to found meeting locales, like markets
- to act in accordance with lore
Sure it won't affect everyone. But it's like viral marketing - once these expectations get established, they spread and persist. Done right, actors-as-missionaries could be used repeatedly to shore up the cultural space of the MMORPG. And thus even though they only interact with a small fraction of the playerbase, their effects are wide-ranging.
And imagine the encouraging effect it would have if players were told, 'some of the other players you meet are people we've hired to just be players; if you group with them, they'll teach you how to roleplay, talk, fight.'
Posted by: Edward Castronova | Apr 05, 2005 at 13:04
Flatfingers,
I have a three-factor answer to your question.
1. Most players want an entertaining Vegas-styled predicable-probability gameplay (all the rants about the grind were mostly about increasing the payout per time spent).
2. Major developers, with major profit motives, cater to the most profitable segment of players. The live-agent driven MMORPGs, like AC or even SWG, appears to only satisfy a small playerbase. Diablo-type gameplay has proven to be popular. The reason could be implementation, but I think that live-agent driven MMORPGs aren't all that popular.
3. Most designers are designing with the perspective of discrete games rather than from the perspective of an evolving franchise.
Going off on tangent on #3: The design document, like a great battle plan, falls apart on contact with implementation, enemy. Do they really think that far ahead with an eye for the franchise? The restrictions Lucas Arts placed on the SWG could be a hinderance to the design team, but could ultimately be a sustainer of the franchise. Only time will tell.
Frank
TMO (MxO), similar to SWG, is in a good position to use their highly-visible character assets to drive momentum.
Posted by: magicback | Apr 05, 2005 at 13:20
Personally, I think that the actors mostly net you nice PR. They don't alter the gameplay experience significantly for most people. To my mind, if we want to unlock storytelling in large-scale online environments (meaning, ones with thousands of players on simultaneously, as opposed to dozens to hundreds) we should be looking to alternate reality games and soap operas for cues, and not to improv theater.
Rich Vogel disagrees with me on the impact of digiteers--he uses the analogy of seeing Mickey Mouse at Disney World. But I don't think any MMO has expended the level of effort that would be required to match Disney's effort.
Posted by: Raph | Apr 05, 2005 at 13:42
Better find a more diplomatic way to phrase that. Last I heard the demographics indicate that the majority of your audience are adults. Very few of them are likely to either need or want someone to teach them how to play, or in general act condescending towards them.
As a player I go to games to relax, not to be preached too. The only reaction you are likely to get is a flood of job applications from people who want to play your game for a living.
Posted by: Thabor | Apr 05, 2005 at 14:04
When Anarchy Online was doing hype buildup to release, a large amount of attention was paid to the fact that they were in possession of a storyline and story arc that was very similar to another science fiction story arc then on the television. In addition, they had a GM team that was going to be devoted to fleshing out this story arc with player interaction...allowing players to actually be part of the story instead of mere voyeurs.
Last I checked, they had canceled the GM/story team and placed those positions in the programming department, because it was more cost-efficient in getting content to players. I was disappointed then, and I'm disappointed now by the lack of interaction with the world in most of the MMOG's today.
I see it not as a matter of hiring actors to interact with the players, but the general attitude towards player interaction taken in the industry today, and the lessons that will be learned from the 1.5 million pound gorilla that shouldn't be. I'm not talking attention to detail, graphics, etc, but rather that lack of impact any one person or group will have on the persistant world as a whole.
The most exciting things to read about in EQ, personally, were the events that changed the world. Waking the Sleeper is one, but the entire giant invasion during the Coldain ring event is probably the best example. You start the event, giants invade. If you successfully rally your troops to fight off the invasion, you succeed...but failure resulted in an entire town being despawned for what...2-3 hours?
A minor impact, but an impact nonetheless. Player actions actually meant something, and failure had consequences.
Perhaps magicback is right, and "Most players want an entertaining Vegas-styled predicable-probability gameplay (all the rants about the grind were mostly about increasing the payout per time spent)." But I know of quite a few who are looking for an alternative world, where things change, nations rise and fall, and people actually feel like their actions in-game make a difference to the way things turn out in the end.
Hiring actors to play the parts of the matrix bunch in-game is a step in the right direction, and it gives me some hope that maybe someday we'll see dynamic worlds with numbers of people playing roles, instead of johnny next door creating Gaaaandaalffe or Legolissa and slaughtering rapid bears until his index finger falls off from over use.
The funny thing is...I'd be willing to pay upwards of 25-30 dollars a month for something like this, if it truly provided what all the products promise and fail to deliver. Player housing, dynamic world-changing events, actors, storylines with arcs that were responsive to player events. Assasinations, intrigue, invasions and rebellions that didn't result in the town just repopping 15 minutes later with NPC's that said the same bloody thing and sold the same bloody thing. Player towns being invaded by the opposing faction, but having the option to do the same right back at'm.
Just a players perspective.
Posted by: Cald | Apr 05, 2005 at 14:11
Last I checked, they had canceled the GM/story team and placed those positions in the programming department, because it was more cost-efficient in getting content to players.
As mentioned previously, it doesn't scale well. An event is a fire and forget happening - work that is visible to a very small part of your population, and which offers no additional benefit beyond that day other than offering cool stories to tell. For the price of two events people, you can probably hire one (junior) programmer, who can add functionality to your game which permanently enriches the game experience for everyone, no matter when they choose to play.
The most exciting things to read about in EQ, personally, were the events that changed the world. Waking the Sleeper is one, but the entire giant invasion during the Coldain ring event is probably the best example. You start the event, giants invade. If you successfully rally your troops to fight off the invasion, you succeed...but failure resulted in an entire town being despawned for what...2-3 hours?
Expect to see more 'automated events' in the future -- events which are triggered by code rather than 'digiteers'. Those sidestep a lot of the issues that standard events staff have. A great example of a small automated event would be the Stitches quest in WoW (SPOILER: completion of a certain quest summons a high level mob that proceeds to go on a rampage through town). Sure, it lacks the personal touch of Darth Vader coming to your town to give you a visit, but it scales well, is exciting every time it happens, and is visible to virtually every player who plays on the Alliance side at least once.
Posted by: Damion Schubert | Apr 05, 2005 at 15:35
Hmm. As a programmer and also an improvised actress, I don't see why the idea of code-triggered ingame events and live acting can't be combined in some sort of code-controlled improvisation. Adherence to scripts is what the players expect. Why not challenge that expectation? That's what these live-action features are supposed to do, after all, but logistically they're impossible to carry out well. (I was on the MxO beta and saw the absolute mobbing that happened to Morpheus et al; the servers and my game client could not cope.) So invoke the tightly-controlled rules of improv (yes, improvised acting has strict rules) and work them into AI...
Posted by: Jez | Apr 05, 2005 at 16:07
<>
(Sorry, not sure how to italicize on this blog.)
I agree that the newness doesn't wear off with the way most big-gun MMOs are currently using these GM-acted events. Sure, if they happen for 1-2 hours once a month, it's going to blow up every time. But I don't think this would continue to happen if the actor-based character were there regularly. At first, yes. But over time, I think the newness would wear off, and it would become more of what our more idealistic sides hope all this could be.
Of course, once the 'newness' wears off, then this feature of a MMO isn't any longer a big PR splash event, as Raph says he views it. Once the 'bang' is gone, it becomes tool for immersion and advancing the concept of story and relatability to the world.
I grudgingly confess that it seems the bigger the MMO's success in numbers of players, the harder it will ever be for them to operate at this level. The idealist in me, however, refuses to belive that some creative person or company can't find a creative way to overcome this obstacle.
I will point out, however, that there are really two separate themes we've devolved into discussing here: One is about ways you can use events as PR tools, make big, memorable splashes. The other is about using actors and other tools to propogate the illusion (or reality) that change can be affected on the world. I'm far less concerned about the former as I am the latter.
And, if change of the world is what you seek, then really bigger MMO devs shouldn't be trying to staff that themselves. It's impossible. MMO developesr should be designing systems that allow players to provide their own change-content through controlled or mitigated in-game tools. But that is, of course, a different discussion. ;)
Posted by: Jythri / Davyn | Apr 05, 2005 at 16:24
We've been using "digiteers" for 8 years now, and I doubt there are many virtual worlds out there that use them as heavily. I've got a pretty good handle on how well they scale, and let me just say: They don't.
--matt
Posted by: Matt Mihaly | Apr 05, 2005 at 17:01
One of the things this conversation is highlighting is that there seems to be little agreement on what "the players" want.
I like world-y games; I like the idea of having a chance to be a meaningful actor in an engaging and epic saga. But maybe my neighbor plays games to work off stress, and prefers a Diablo- or Unreal-style twitchfest. And then there's the guy down the road whose primary interest is socializing with friends through roleplaying, and the lady who's done with a game once she's levelled up as quickly as possible, and so on.
How in the world does one game satisfy all of us?
Even more painful was the realization (no suprise to the veterans here, I expect) that it's not just that different players have contradictory goals -- individual players contradict themselves!
Example: The same person who complains/brags about maxing out his character too quickly, and bashes the game because "there's no high-level content," seems also to be the first person who howls when the game's rules are changed to offer the very features he demanded. You, the developer, are expected to provide a consistent stream of novel experiences... but you're not allowed to change the game rules (that he invested so much time in learning) to do so.
How can *any* developer succeed in pleasing such an inconsistent audience? Is content creation by players (a la Jythri/Davyn) a way out of the dilemma?
Maybe not. Maybe the future of MMOGs is a deepening of the game-y/world-y schism -- a lot of games focusing solely on competitive level-based combat, and a few worlds that focus solely on cooperatively exploring places and relationships. The worlds will use actors to advance complex emotional storylines (as in the soap operas Raph mentioned); the games won't have actors at all -- in fact, they may eventually eliminate PvE play completely.
Meantime, any product that tries to be both a fun game and a rich world goes down in flames.
So: am I committing the Futurist's Fallacy of projecting the future as a straight-line extrapolation of currently known trends? Or is this an accurate read on how MMOG development has to react to what appears to be a highly diverse consumer population?
Isn't the question of actor/GM intervention really subsidiary to "what kind of game is it?"
--Flatfingers
Posted by: Flatfingers | Apr 05, 2005 at 17:15
Edward> Sure it won't affect everyone. But it's like viral marketing - once these expectations get established, they spread and persist.
This is exactly right. You don't need to come across a human controlled NPC to be effected by the fact that there ARE human controlled NPCs in the world. It starts fostering that much needed illusion that there is some sort of interaction possible with the non-player side of the world that actually makes some sort of difference.
The amount of actors needs to be seen in view of the number of hours they are on. If you have two shifts of ten actors working normal, fourty hour weeks you dont have twenty points of contact but 1600 hours of potential contact hours. I dont see why a 'select' group of 'same' players would be the only ones effected by this, directly AND indirectly. And these actors can be deployed in various level locations at variable times. I think that the unpredictability of their locations adds a desirable change to the static nature of most MMOGs where players know where to go and what to expect if they ask others.
Posted by: Gordon Calleja | Apr 05, 2005 at 17:24
Hi, Arnold! It's been a looong time! ;)
Enough people have commented on the scale problems that I won't rehash them. For the record while I was on URU I argued vehemently against the use of live actors. Though I agree that had little to do with the game not catching on.
But I particularly agree with Damion that these events can be far more cost effective when handled by coding and not live actors. And Edward, with all due respect, I believe you have it exactly backwards. The seeding should be done by coding (either/or scripted and systemic events), and that leads to emergent behavior in the player populace. They ultimately should be the only live actors we need. And they are paying -us-.
As usual Horizons doesn't seem to get mentioned much in these discussions, but Horizons in its first story arc had the best balance of scripted/coded events and human actors I've seen to date. Even so a lack of understanding of "lead time;" a generous under-estimation of the content necessary; and the usual lack of professional storytelling support quickly doomed Horizon's attempts at their dynamic world. For for a short, sweet space they proved it could be done without AC's elitism (for the longest time most of the true player/story interaction occurred on the highest levels); zone-clogging; and lack of true consequences to the overall player experience.
The reason live actors keep coming up in MMOG's (not MUDs, Matt!) is that they are proposed by people who haven't figured out how to create an equally compelling experience with a combination of scripted and systemic tools. All they can cling to is thinking that somehow these events, so reminiscent of that kitchen table experience, can be scaled. They cannot.
Lee
Posted by: Lee Sheldon | Apr 05, 2005 at 18:00
A Tale in the Desert has had events run by live "actors". The events team is run by a GM (in ATITD GMs are unpaid volunteers), and characters are played by paying players who have a desire to role play that are recruited and screened by the GM running the team. The events team has some assistance from Andy (lead developer) in the form of small code changes and the occasional unique item.
Some of the events have been very elaborate and played out over several weeks, such as the events at the end of the first telling of ATITD, which involved a death cult, prophetic visions, the search for a missing priestess, a murder and the subsequent apprehension and trial of the murderer. All of this was taking place while an algae plague was working its way down the nile and the players were racing to complete the construction of 7 monuments so that we could "win" the telling.
Of course running events in this way has its problems too. There have been disruptions of events due to politics among the volunteers, and the events don't occur regularly since the GM running things has a day job and can't always spend the large ammount of time needed to plan and run them.
Having one paid actor per 1000-10000 players is never going to result in a meaningful interaction for most players. Harnessing the manpower and energy of the players to run events might be a way to have more meaningful events accessible to more players.
--Jeff
Posted by: Jeff Weinstein | Apr 05, 2005 at 18:15
I love using volunteers if possible. Unfortunately, most of your larger games and companies are going to shy away from volunteers due to the legal issues that were raised in the days of UO and Everquest.
Volunteers had issues, too. On UO, there was a significant problem getting the volunteers to run small events that touched lots of people. Most of them wanted to run long-term 'campaigns' that were driven by their tabletop experience. Unfortunately, that's even worse than your standard events experience in terms of scalability - a small group of 20 people get a wonderfully told story over the course of a month, but the rest of the server's population gets almost nothing.
Posted by: Damion Schubert | Apr 05, 2005 at 19:29
This is a question asked in total niavete, but has anyone ever tried to create a game where a GM's character can appear on multiple servers simultaneously?
I ask because I think this may be a method by which semi-dynamic content could be delivered more easily. I say "semi", because a GM controlling a character that appears concurrently on, say, 20 servers is not really going to be able to conduct much two-way dialog, nor really be in combat with any of the players involved.
This also wouldn't work for any game where players had any ability to permanently changed the world, so ATITD, SWG, UO, SB, and Ryl come to mind as such games that are out :)
Otherwise though, as a method for delivering scripted dialog-tree scripted events that don't require much real conversation, is this something worth exploring?
Heck, is it something even technically possible?
Posted by: Darniaq | Apr 05, 2005 at 21:04
Rich Vogel disagrees with me on the impact of digiteers--he uses the analogy of seeing Mickey Mouse at Disney World. But I don't think any MMO has expended the level of effort that would be required to match Disney's effort.
One can certainly achieve something by having King Kong visit the world, but I am not sure if even Disney can handle the server stress and all the "superheroes"/"uberguilds" among the players who will try to send the storyline down their own alley and create all the noise they can generate to get attention... Not to mention all the sources of envy such events can generate. You can go facist or very superficial, of course.
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | Apr 05, 2005 at 21:30
About Edward's missionaries:
I see a wild flaw in your assumption that online worlds start from scratch, ie without history. Any online world is populated from immigrants, who come with a ton of cultural luggage, both from RealLife™ and possible previous online-worldly experiences.
Another issue with cultural and social dynamics in commercial online worlds is how initial culture is displaced around release time, when the unwashed masses drown your warm and fuzzy beta user base, who then are too overwhelmed by the numbers to have a decent shot at educating newcomers.
The second issue can be worked around with some smarts, planning and community building. The first makes missionaries a very poor investment, imo.
Cheers,
-- Yaka.
Posted by: Yaka St.Aise | Apr 05, 2005 at 22:18
While devoting specialist staff (writers and actors) to stir the pot and adding depth and breadth are great and workable - if challenging - concepts, I reckon they usually fail for taking things backwards.
The whole concept of 'Events' is counterproductive. It raises expectations to an impossible to meet level, and underdelivers promptly by reaching only a few select players.
The worst effect of GM events is indirect: it supports the assumption (generally true) that players have no influence whatsoever on the world by clearly marking the few occasions players are thrown a bone, which deters any attempts by players at getting ovolved in the archstory, and eventually kills any interest in and relevance thereof.
The near-exclusive use of 'high profile' characters (especially famous heroes from the continuity/backstory) is even worse, as it focuses the attention away from the world, gameplay and player-driven action, and only makes more obvious how Joe Player is never to be 'the Protagonist'.
At a wider scale, it is a built-in design flaw of most online worlds based on franchises (movie/book leased IP), as they come bundled with a hero-centric backstory that is very hostile to the MM in MMOG.
Another depressing occurrence of 'Good'ole Legacy' syndrome, attempting to shoehorn massive online worlds in PnP, MP or even single-player games models and features.
On a more optimist note, I've experienced (mostly on MUDs) how a live team can make a very efficient use of low-profile staff-RP'ed characters to start stories, or further the plot by involving guild and individuals, unbeknownst to players they were part of a 'GM event'.
***
One of the most efficient GM-driven plots I've been involved in had a couple (1-5, depending on times) live-team members play regular characters, on and off for more than two months, eventually making their way into several guilds and bringing three towns to the brink of war without any visible use of GM superpowers.
The same could have happened without the liveteam intervention, but the odds of simultaneous high tension in several places happening in the same time frame was very low.
Meanwhile, and behind the scene, scripters were slaving away on the preparation of a big NPC onslaught of the region, which happened right on time to maximize and benefit from the high dramatic tension already built by the warring guilds.
Much fun ensued, only matched by the fun players had over the weeks before the mobs hordes chimed in.
What is the difference with a "GM event" then ?
From a high-level design perspective, it was a GM-Players mutually driven experience, which is plain cool, but also brings a lot of benefits (see below).
From a player perspective, it looked like a purely player-driven thing, in which everyone was free to meddle in without worrying about being (or not) part of the select few in the DM's eye.
The duration and the scope of the event were made possible by the fact players actually did make most of it happen: guilds drove the markets crazy by preparing for war, which involved even un-guilded hunters, gatherers and crafters, created trouble with druid-types fearing for destruction of the woods, added tension between races, etc.
This 'event' over the course of roughly 5 weeks saw a direct involvement of an estimated 80% of the (admittedly small) playerbase, which accounting for people who didn't log in more than 10 total hours over this time made for a whopping 96% of the ±300 players.
This is not to say each player had a bearing on the storyline, obviously, but nearly anyone who cared to get involved in the game was involved in the storyline at a measurable level - and actually had a shot at influencing it.
Very few resources and members of the liveteam were needed, and their apparent regular players status didn't require them to log in on a specific schedule, nor did they get spammed by attention whores every time they showed up (nobody knew about it before the arc resolved, and about half of the staff-RP'ed characters where never identified as such by the players).
A host of separate player plots happened, including a successful assassination carried on one of the (GM) guild moles by a jealous guild-mate (who eventually did a good enough job of getting his guild where said GM character was supposed to lead it).
This doesn't happen on classic GM events that more or less move on rails and don't allow the 'audience' to disrupt the scripted play.
***
I'm sure I'm not the only one here to have experienced, either as a GM and/or player such high-times in a MUD, and I'm convinced the same can be done better in a 'Massive' environment, provided the quantitative weight is leveraged to make a qualitative difference, instead of porting D&D tricks to userbases in the thousands.Got ideas, will travel,
-- Yaka.
Posted by: Yaka St.Aise | Apr 05, 2005 at 22:21
Yaka St. Aise>Any online world is populated from immigrants, who come with a ton of cultural luggage, both from RealLife™ and possible previous online-worldly experiences.
It did used to be the case that communities could form spontaneously and independently in virtual worlds. The classic paper on this subject is Liz Reid's Cultural Formations in Text-Based Virtual Realities. Nowadays, though, you're right: there are so many people who have played other virtual worlds that when a new one starts they bring cultural expectations with them.
There has always been culture imported from the real world (eg. use of real-world languages). The increasing size of the overall player base is bringing us more of this, though, because people don't have time to assimilate the virtual culture before asserting aspects of their real-world culture. How long before people look at male players playing female characters with the same askance view they look at men who dress as women?
I touched on some of these issues in a talk I gave at ITU Copenhagen a couple of years ago (slides available here).
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Apr 06, 2005 at 03:10
Suggestion about the scaling of events.
Yes, events with digiteers dont scale well to a huge crowd of people - if for no other reason than many players in one area means unbearable lag and may even crash the server. However, if the result of one event .. or a series of related events .. influences a larger area, therefore more players, over a week or so (and the players are told why by a general mail to all) ... THEN this event has an influence on many more people than those who actually participated.
Let me give you an example. In Star Wars Galaxies the Emperor decides to visit Dathomir as the Dark Side Witches of Dathomir interest him. Event 1 ... Emperor and the Leader of the Dark Witches meet ... and loath each other. Imperial players have to fight the Nightsisters while The Emperor and his Royal Guard board their shuttle. Rancors all over the place. Event 2 .. the rebels heard about the visit. A strike team in space wants to shoot down the shuttle and its escort which is on their way to rendevousz with a star destroyer in space above Dathomir. Event 3 .. Star Destroyer en route to Naboo to the Emperors Retreat ... players have to destroy it (its a decoy but they dont know that). Event 4 ... Emperor arrives on Naboo and a procession of vehicles is on its way from Moenia to the Emperors Retreat ... battling all the way ... the Emperor gets away (in his indestructible ATAT) but the whole convoy is a battlezone.
So much of the direct events. The indirect effect is :
a) Dathomir space and ground and Naboo ground around Moenia .... EXTREMELY increased imperial presence. Royal Guard fighters. Royal Guard NPCs.
b) Imperial bases (on Naboo only ?) have doubled combat value for a week.
c) Imperial Crackdown team more vigilant, tougher and more numerous for a week.
d) If rebels kill a certain number of fighters in Event 2 and the star destroyer in Event 3 ... 30 % cheaper faction equipment for a week.
e) Imperial players get a boost of 20 % in faction points for a week saving the emperor and GCW rating on Naboo gets a +50 point boost for a week on the Imperial side.
I know, too long and too specific an example ... but i guess you could imagine a similiar scenario in various games (Horde and Alliance / Omnitech and Clans / Agents and Zion etc.). Events for a small number of people shape the world TEMPORARILY for a larger number of people .. and THAT soon becomes local legend on this server or that, depending on outcome.
Have fun
Erillion
Posted by: Erillion | Apr 06, 2005 at 04:34
> Erillion wrote:
Short version:
"For your admirable dedication and sacrifice in serving the [insert faction], and tipping the balance of the universe, Wars-Mart is happy to grant you this incredible rebate coupon, valid one week in all our stores."
Yay ! Onward, heroes !
/me crawls back under his rock.
Posted by: Yaka St.Aise | Apr 06, 2005 at 05:49
So, so far we have arguements and examples for the lack of scalability and likewise for scalable implementations.
I have been watching the Las Vegas, the US prime time drama and the show has hit on a winning formula. You got the glitz, the sin, the gambling, and the family entertainment. What the show also have is a host of diverse, interesting, and attractive actors. To top this off, they have famous guess appearances. Sure, the viewers watch the show day-in and day-out for the regular stars and shows, but the guess appearances do enhances the appeal.
Just as we have people augmenting computer-automated programming (from managing program trading of billions of dollars to cracking Yahoo's human-recognition security features), I don't see why the utilization of live-agents can't be a competitive advantage in this competitive marketplace.
Frank
Posted by: magicback | Apr 06, 2005 at 11:37
magicback> I don't see why the utilization of live-agents can't be a competitive advantage in this competitive marketplace.
Well, if you are doing video-streams then it can probably be a competitive advantage. Live-directors of combat scenarios work too.
If you just let an actor control an NPC then you don't get much bangs for your bucks. Partially because the performance could've been done by a volunteer with roughly the same outcome and partially because you need to cover approx 3000 players every day with a population of 300000 (assuming players stay for 3-4 months) and then they only get the experience once.
Posted by: Ola Fosheim Grøstad | Apr 06, 2005 at 12:40
Yaka, the example you cited sounds interesting, but it raises a troubling question for me.
I don't like feeling manipulated. Ever. In any way. But isn't that precisely what happens when GMs impersonate players?
In a small, stable environment of mature players, where most everyone understands that some "players" may actually be GMs, maybe this isn't a problem. (It certainly isn't a problem in a tabletop game where the GM is required to actively manipulate players as part of creating the game world.) But I don't think that would work in an environment with a large number of constantly changing players, many of whom might not be aware of the "player might be a GM" rule.
The first time some player realized he'd been manipulated by a GM posing as a player, all hell would break loose. Then your game would spend the rest of its lifetime under a constant cloud of suspicion -- players would lose trust in GMs as impartial referees, and lose trust in each other.
I don't think there can be a successful middle ground here. Either you (as a GM) maintain strict separation from players (you never inhabit an avatar that could be a subscribing player), or you make sure every player understands that any player at any time might actually be a GM.
Trying to do this kind of manipulation informally can only produce unhappy surprises that benefit no one.
--Flatfingers
Posted by: Flatfingers | Apr 06, 2005 at 13:15
I tend to agree with the drift of Flatfingers' general comments, but let me ask about a technical strategy for dealing with the scaling issue. How plausible might it be to have an imagineer's avatar be cloned, individually and randomly reskinned, and then simultaneously distributed in twenty locations throughout the gameworld? So imagine, for example, that two imagineers in Star Wars: Galaxies could control a single avatar but have the "scene" they play appear simultaneously in every NPC city cantina--the same movements, the same dialogue, but perhaps with different skins on each instance or iteration of the two avatars? You could have the same barroom brawl or sinister conversation or confrontation appear in distributed form across a whole server, and many people could experience it. Sure, afterwards, they'd all say, "Hey, that was the same one I saw", but that doesn't strike me as a problem, really--players fight and kill the same mobs that other players fought and killed an hour ago, after all.
My cynical thought for the day on this subject: many of the more recent live teams in MMOGs don't believe that they're any good at acting in character and don't much care for or feel they have any aptitude with story-writing or story elements to begin with. Scalability is partially an alibi, usually using UO as a kind of "proof" of the problems with such approaches, just as UO is used as "proof" that certain forms of PvP don't work. This is one place where there's just a divide between the many of the wizards who designed and managed MUDs and the current live-management MMOG developers. The live-management teams are much more dominated by systems geeks, by people who think about software and about game systems, not about aesthetics or content or narrative. I don't think this is just about trying to save a buck, either.
Posted by: Timothy Burke | Apr 06, 2005 at 15:10
One way to make storyline using actors: Have little cinematic unlockables that you can watch (or that pop up automatically) after you complete a line of quests. Hey, it worked for Diablo, didn't it?
Diablo Was a World:
Diablo had both a storyline and a well-made world. Yes, the map was always random, but certain landmarks were always present in every version of the same area. This made the same area still feel "familiar" to those who had been there before even though every area was technically unique. Plus, many of the more important locations (usually the boss/mini-boss rooms) were not random.
Disney (Warning: Tangent Ahead)
Also, you could use the example of Disney, as stated earlier. Except that Mickey Mouse isn't an actor, he's just a bum in a suit. He's trained to say stuff. He's an NPC in many ways. However, he's not an NPC, in that his actions are not entirely predictable. This could be an idea you could use in a MMORPG: MOBs who follow a set of "rules" but never act in the same way twice. However, that's somewhat tangetial to the original post.
Posted by: Capt_Poco | Apr 06, 2005 at 15:42
In a small, stable environment of mature players, where most everyone understands that some "players" may actually be GMs, maybe this isn't a problem. (It certainly isn't a problem in a tabletop game where the GM is required to actively manipulate players as part of creating the game world.) But I don't think that would work in an environment with a large number of constantly changing players, many of whom might not be aware of the "player might be a GM" rule.
My memory is hazy on the issue, but I seem to remember that UO eventually moved towards their events staff having purple names. It was widely criticized by the player base, but I thin it was the right move. It wasn't for the reason you cited -- rather it was to cut down on the number of 'hacker reports' that turned out to be simply Events staff doing things with event tools no 'mortals' could do.
Posted by: Damion Schubert | Apr 06, 2005 at 15:55
Timothy Burke:
"many of the more recent live teams in MMOGs don't believe that they're any good at acting in character and don't much care for or feel they have any aptitude with story-writing or story elements to begin with."
They're right. As you go on to state, there are a lot of people in the wrong jobs in MMOGs.
Posted by: Lee Sheldon | Apr 06, 2005 at 17:27
> Flatfingers wrote:
Isn't consenting to be 'manipulated' what suspension of disbelief is all about ?
From a high-level perspective, there is a good case to be made that players who enter a simulation of a fictional world beg to be deceived, as long as it improves the experience, and I've yet to hear any complaint about the smoke and mirrors working too well for players' tastes - while there is an infinite supply of whinery (often justified) about how nooks and crannies showing through stitched curtains break immersion in a very frustrating manner.
More to the practical point of your concerns, which I can understand: you aptly stated you don't want to feel manipulated, and I couldn't agree more. That would constitute an insult to the players' intelligence for liveteam 'moles' to get caught and identified as such, so when you decide to go down this path (as a live team) you better be sure you're ready to do what it takes to get to the smooth end of it.
Maybe your experience of GM-ran events is biasing your perception of how far it is possible to stray away from the 'rail' model of hard-scripted events. Our philosophy was to stir the pot and react to players actions. This worked pretty well and in the aftermath we had nothing but good feedback on the whole thing.
It started from the simple observation that players heavily metagame around GMs and story-supporting NPCs, which was defeating any hope for the immersiveness they claimed they craved.
We then figured out we could aikido this in our favor and out-metagame this habit by using non-obvious agents to influence a plot.
The hope was to kill predictability about what could be 'important' or not, and keep players on their toes, which is what they expected of this specific setting (permadeath MUD*, btw).
Regarding the example I offered above, it was the topic of much discussion in the game live team before it was green-lighted, and rules were created to control how it was to be handled.
Without getting down to boring details, the gist of it went like this.
- Moles would be played only by GMs who had no other affiliations than the game operators (i.e. no acct or character other than those related to their GM role).
- Moles would have no GM 'super powers', except for access to a couple special 'operators' chat channels (in-game irc client).
- Moles would have their individual agenda and, unless their character's design called for it, would have the most limited knowledge of who the other moles might be (at least in game) and of there whereabouts.
That's the digest version of the rules.
The idea to call on volunteer players, some of whom played assistant-GM roles (using another character and account than their private, regular one) was discussed and dismissed because of unworkable risks of conflicts of interests. While the Mole GMs could have gained access to more intel than they were supposed to, it was a general agreement that keeping them (with their consent) surrounded by some fog of war actually eased their RP.
Another key element that maybe wasn't obvious from my previous post is how Moles, despite having set goals to start, had no obligation of success for the event to be a success (I mentioned how one died: she wasn't replaced). The NPC onslaught was planned, and would happen no matter what, as it was by no means bound to the Moles individual agendas.
The idea was to have the towns ready for war, in hope players would be more ready to face the NPC assault, and to raise the dramatic tension before that. This part was a success.
All along, the clear cut limit for the live team was we wouldn't force the outcome of the Moles part upon the players.
Moles could have utterly failed to achieve their objectives, we would then have ran a generic (albeit crafty in this case) event, with a bunch of NPCs rushing through barely prepared towns, only made aware of the incoming trouble by a couple NPC-spread rumors and the possible NPC scouts spotting by PC hunters/explorers.
You're right about players' awareness of GMs possibly roaming the world under the disguise of regular players (instead of flagged NPCs) being paradigm changing.
From my experience (admittedly anecdotal), you're dead wrong on how players react, though.
The actual effect was that players from then on knew any PC could be a GM, or could be a PC involved in a GM-supported plot unbeknownst to the player. This led to a greater involvement of players in purely player-driven events, and more opportunities for new players with good RP and creative skills to 'make things happen'.
One interesting question is: should players know beforehand ?
Well, in this case they only figured afterwards, due to euphoria-induced post event leaks, and only to a limited extent (basically only the moles that were dead by then had their cover blown with any certainty), and we even went as far (at the surviving moles suggestion) to keep the remaining characters active for a while afterwards to cover their tracks.
Obviously it was manipulative, much in the same way that friends can be manipulative for each others' good, or much in the same way that we never posted patch logs for new content before enough players had found out by themselves for it to be widespread knowledge.
Is that manipulative ? Sure, but we figured it was more fun for players (even though I can assure you it can be frustrating for content designers and area builders when players take a subjectively long time to discover their new shiney).
We never ran any event of such magnitude again for the time I was involved (with multiple moles semi-synched, etc), but we re-used the mole tactic more than once, to support player-driven initiatives or hint at new story components.
I'm not saying it is my personal idea of the best way to get actual epic in an online world, as I'm more adept of sand-boxing (with toys) yet, in the limited context of : "What is an effective use of live actors in a game world ?", it looks to me like one of the best bang for your buck and least immersion-breaking implementations one can hope for.
hth,
-- Yaka.
* It was semi-hardcore PD style, with low odds of fast death, no rezzes, decent healing available, long recovery times, and a low emphasis on combat.
Posted by: Yaka St.Aise | Apr 06, 2005 at 18:40
>Damion Schubert wrote:
With all the - huge and heartfelt - respect I have for UO, this kind of move looks to me like a clear sign of failure when it comes to online worlds (even of the fantasy sort).
When you start to slap company badges on characters, you're not producing live fiction anymore, you're running a theme park, with rides and soda booth, reeking of fakeness for who seeks more than shallow entertainment and hopes for actual fun.
As stated above there is a simple fix around this specific issue: don't make your GM-RP'ed suporting characters use oober powers.
Of course it takes more smarts, and maybe some writing.
...may [insert your deity of choice] save us from that. :P
-- Yaka.
Posted by: Yaka St.Aise | Apr 06, 2005 at 18:55
Fair enough, Yaka, and my sincere thanks for taking the time to describe your experiences and approach to using GMs.
I respectfully retain my skepticism as to whether the response you got would be replicated in A Big Game. Given the players I've seen and heard, I don't think the typical gamer has the maturity to be able to distinguish (as you did) between manipulation-to-achieve-story and manipulation-to-grief. Therefore I don't believe the revelation that players have been manipulated would be received by the typical player of a MMOG with anything but outrage and long-term suspicion.
How long would it be before the term "Massively Manipulative Online Game" started floating around?
I could be wrong, of course. Either way, I wish more game worlds were filled with players like the ones you describe.
--Flatfingers
Posted by: Flatfingers | Apr 06, 2005 at 20:08
The use of purple names for Seer characters in UO was another nail in the coffin of player-run events.
Pre-purple names, I helped run player events which were mistaken for genuine GM events. This is done, as Yaka suggests, through the creative use of alts, etc. This also allowed us to do the plot arc which only affects 20-30 people without feeling guilty about ignoring the rest of the server.
The purple names just reinforces the theme-park meme. "Oh, this isn't a real event, no purple name..." Or, "Look - purple name! I should talk to/try to kill that person!"
Running an event with no flashy tools or scripts is hard, as Yaka says. Having it further marginalized by not getting the Purple Stamp of Approval is disheartening.
- Brask Mumei
Posted by: Brask Mumei | Apr 06, 2005 at 20:08
With all the - huge and heartfelt - respect I have for UO, this kind of move looks to me like a clear sign of failure when it comes to online worlds (even of the fantasy sort). When you start to slap company badges on characters, you're not producing live fiction anymore, you're running a theme park, with rides and soda booth, reeking of fakeness for who seeks more than shallow entertainment and hopes for actual fun.
With all due respect, it's exactly this sort of attitude that many events managers have taken, which has ended up getting their programs marginalized or shut down. Simply put, an MMO can exist without a digiteer team, but it cannot exist without customer service. If the costs of providing an events team drives up the costs of providing the customer service, you can bet your sweet ass that the people running the project won't get you more CSRs to cover the load created by events.
At any rate, one of the nice side effects of purple names is that, for the first time in UO, people actually acknowledged that they were witnessing events. Previous to that, most players you asked would say that they had never seen an event -- EVEN IF YOU ASKED THEM IN THE MIDDLE OF ONE. When most players polled can't be sure that they've been in one-- suddenly you've got a real problem defending the role and price tag of your digiteers.
As stated above there is a simple fix around this specific issue: don't make your GM-RP'ed suporting characters use oober powers.
I don't think that witnessing Darth Vader in SWG or Morpheus in MxO would be very inspiring if they were 'just like everyone else'. One of the great allures of events is showing people something they've never seen before in a world that is otherwise static and prone to repetition.
Posted by: Damion Schubert | Apr 07, 2005 at 02:40
Another suggestion about scalability of life events ... you cant have hundreds of players participating in a small area. But what keeps you from broadcasting their adventure to "the big screen" across the server ?
Wether its a probot having its camera on the scene for a media corp in SWG, broadcasting live to all starport screens, or the BBC (Board of Broadcasting Conjurers) showing the scenes in Orbs of Seeing across the globe in Generic Fantasy MMORPG (TM).... you can reach a much larger audience, entertain them and make them feel like taking part.
And a server wide announcement can tell players when such a broadcast starts.
Have fun
Erillion
Posted by: Erillion | Apr 07, 2005 at 03:59
Damion,
I suspect there is some sort of misunderstanding here.
If a live-team decides to use high-profile characters from the continuity like Morpheus or Darth Vader, there is obviously no point in pretending these are genuine PCs.
If you care to read up a few posts, I stated I don't condone the use of high-profile characters as a rule, and I explained my rationale.
Thus, I thought it was clear my previous post about purple names didn't apply to events using high profile chars, but to seamless events.
Sorry if I wasn't clear enough about that.
That player complain they never have been into an event because they can't figure whether they actually have partaken/witnessed one is another issue entirely, which I'll be happy to discuss separately if you feel like it.
The presence of in game CSR is a different - albeit related and non-exclusive - thing from the presence of supporting (story wise) characters played by the live team staff.
My suggestion here is to use easily identifiable NPCs (such as town guards) to act as a doorbell and vessel for GM (as in CSR) intervention. This allows to take care of players concern without disrupting immersion for all passerby's.
Just my two cents,
-- Yaka.
Posted by: Yaka St.Aise | Apr 07, 2005 at 06:07
Yaka: If you care to read up a few posts, I stated I don't condone the use of high-profile characters as a rule, and I explained my rationale. Thus, I thought it was clear my previous post about purple names didn't apply to events using high profile chars, but to seamless events.
And part of my point is that seamless events ultimately should not be the goal of an events team. The reach of them is too low. The low visibility of them makes your events team politically vulnerable in an organization. And fundamentally, when the job that your events team does could also be done by motivated players (as was the case apparently by Brask Mumei), it becomes even harder to defend your team.
Erillion: Another suggestion about scalability of life events ... you cant have hundreds of players participating in a small area. But what keeps you from broadcasting their adventure to "the big screen" across the server ?
Events that are observational in nature usually fail. Doing an occasional 'talkie' event where a crowd of people listens to Morpheus give a speech can occasionally work out, but for the most part, the players want to DO something. They wouldn't give 2 cents about the story, what they want is the activity.
Of course, you can chalk it up to the players being stupid. I think of it as simply the way to use the medium best. Just as movies work best when you show instead of tell, MMO events work best when you ask players to interact, not observe.
Posted by: Damion Schubert | Apr 07, 2005 at 11:35
The first big event appears to have been kicked off last night. Actors involvement if any was minimal.
Morpheus and other characters provided some context to events, and advance the story line. Agents spawned in large numbers all over, at levels "appropriate" to the area in which they spawned. Unfortunately being fairly new to the scene I freqently found myself confronted by hostile spawns about twice my level when I attempted to do regular missions. Also the special spawns appeared to be hostile even to characters supposedly of the same faction.
Everyone was assigned the task of collecting residual bits of data Neo scattered around the Matrix. Unfortunately there was no hint of actually being able to discover a bit yourself. The only way to gather them was to kill special spawns who had already gathered them.
If the event persists for a few days perhaps it will be a success.. Then again perhaps not. It seems well recieved by some of the higher level players. For lower level ones it seems to be a serious hinderance.
Posted by: Thabor | Apr 07, 2005 at 12:22
Wow, I miss two days of looking up Terra Nova and a really interesting subject appears that affects more than a bit. There’s a lot of interesting points being raised by both sides really and in the end it comes down to what is what is your approach to a problem and what type of MMO do you have.
An event team is only as useful as you make it. Its true purpose is to make players feel as though they are in a dynamic world, but they can have many secondary tasks that are almost as important. One of the ways they make worlds more interactive is by offering features that are otherwise unavailable in the game. An example of this would be transferring a town from one faction to another even if there are no “player” mechanics to do this.
Another is to create a mythos around the world and a few main characters that players can use as role models. Someone said that it removes the focus on the world or shows how players are limited in action, well who’s to say that the players can’t eventually surpass the main characters and take their place?
As games become more and more dynamic, an event team’s first task will become less important. Its secondary tasks become more interesting. Letting the players decide on the possible new feature to introduce in the game through an event’s outcome. Getting players to help in the testing of new features during beta testing. Creating world conflict so that the game doesn’t become stagnate. Giving players a sense of purpose in the world and giving them a set of goals to reach. Creating a stronger community centered on factions or possibly GM-guilds to help all the new players to the world.
An example of a few of those would be Shadowbane’s close beta phase 3, I think. The developers created a bunch of different Feature Characters and separated them into two main factions. Every beta player decided to join a side and immediately had a purpose to play and a multi-facet community. Players worked together to fight their common enemy even if they had been enemies just one phase prior. Later in beta you had the Vanishing Tower event which attracted quite a large portion of the population in different teams. That event also helped in discovering other bugs and testing out certain features.
But Events have problems that need to be addressed. One of the problems with Scalability is, like someone already mentioned, that many of the event teams were being lead by people who either shared multiple jobs within the company or who were simply basing it off their tabletop memories. If you try to recreate the feeling you had in the living room when you played with a bunch of friends, you’ll get events that cater only to a handful of player.
Your first task would be to scale the story to the size of the world instead of that of a small group. Using pre-established world factions (not guilds, but lore factions), giving each a set of goals that might cause conflict between each faction, creating a set of multiple outcomes, having lasting effects on the world, etc.
I’ll use Everquest as an example here. The Daughter of Innoruuk’s story (which was taken from a player event), rallied many players under a different causes, I don’t know the exact numbers, but there were at least two hundred players that participated. The end event had the Dark team trying to take over High Pass, but on all servers they failed due to either players or massive amounts of NPCs. Now if High Pass could have been taken, it would have been a lasting effect that gave the players the illusion that the world is less static than originally guessed.
Another Scalability problem is impact and follow-ups. While you can reach a limited number of players during an event, it needs to have a trickle down effect. World changing effects are one way, be it changing NPCs, to changing weather to changing physics. One of the simplest things that is often overlooked are chronicles and reporting on events. This is especially important if you plan on having an evolving story.
Not many of the previous MMOs that had event teams had a good reporting system to show players what has happened in their world. Some had a few, but it wasn’t kept up to date. Matrix Online looks to be ready to tackle on this issue with Node One so that players that appear at whatever point of the story can understand what has happened and get right into it. Also, a chronicle that drops a few player names is a great reward since those players have bragging rights to show to their friends.
A third issue is setup. A lot of events are done on the fly without any prior warning or a prelude, the bane of one-shot events. If you want players to be able to participate in an event, you sometimes have to give them prior warning so they know when and where they have to be. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, but in some cases it’s an essential thing. On the same note, while you might not be able to see everyone in game, you can interact with them on other mediums like the Forums or IRC or AIM and keep them in the story. The AIM idea that the TMO team is using is something I’ll be interested in seeing develop.
Another BIG issue is zone density. This is a technical issue to deal with depending on worlds. If you can’t have a hundred people in the same spot, then you need to break up groups. This might mean you need more actors to lead different groups, have a treasure hunt setup or send players on multiple tasks. The hologram example is also a good one, but the more limited the zone density is, the more work an event becomes.
There are more issues to events as there are issues for almost any way to approach a problem. Nothing is perfect really. It’s true that you want to have all the functionalities within the games so that the players can do it themselves, but until we can create the perfect game, there will always be something more the players wish they could do.
Posted by: Charles Ferguson | Apr 07, 2005 at 14:21
By way of note, some of the circumstances of the event are different from what I described earlier. However, that wasn't visible to me during casual play. That is probably a critical point to remember for any MMOG conducting events.
A casual player may not be following the latest news on Data Node One, or Radio Free Zion and you shouldn't require them to in order for them to understand whatever is going on.
Posted by: Thabor | Apr 08, 2005 at 12:06
>Damion wrote:
That's a very bold statement to make, and I which I could muster such confidence in my knowledge of the trade. ;)
Seriously, it seems highly dependent on the theme of the game, the mechanics, the userbase and skill-set of your live team - as well as the resources you have at hand relatively to the above.
I respectfully disagree.
I believe I made a good case that seamless events, managed properly have a better outreach than most 'ride' events, as they leverage/maximize players' initiatives/participation instead of shoveling 'entertainment' onto the community from the highs.
That's a very good point, and - as stated earlier - a totally different one.
Seamless events, by nature, have a harder to assess quantitative impact, and may not be so good political tools to defend one's salary when the worthiness of live events staff is questioned.
That's a real issue, which I don't mean to overlook.
Still, being able to state how many people attended/witnessed a 'shiney' event doesn't give you any usable qualitative information.
Again, both are important - yet distinct - questions about live team and in game events, mixing both for the sake of practicality (because one is easier to chart and pitch than the other) is just mixing up the map and the territory.
Partly addressed above: players can do wonderful stuff, and provide great opportunities for seamless supporting events to maximize their impact or increase their reach.
How to quantify the worth of the live team efforts in such cases can be tricky, I agree, but this fact doesn't negate said worth.
In the same line of thought, playing facilitator with a low profile is something players can't take on themselves in many situations, where it would entail huge conflicts of interests a live team is (potentially) immune to.
fwiw,
-- Yaka.
PS: Are we ready to discuss the standing of live teams in corporate politics, here ?
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