would not-so-massively multiplayer be better?

News & General Discussion
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Just some idle thoughts for the day.

What if you made a game that was like an MMO, but without the first “M”? Where you would explicitly set up an instance (world, shard, server, whatever you want to call it) to play among your friends? This would live in the cloud — unlike traditional multiplayer games where you set up a server, you wouldn’t actually run it on your machine. But you (or some committee of you’s that you appoint) would get to approve or ban users, so you keep it to people you know and who play nice.

The point, of course, is to fix the big problem I keep hearing about MMOs, which is people being asses to each other.

It also helps somewhat with the more subtle problem of experienced players inadvertently making it hard for new players, by simply out-competing them economically, or combat-wise, or whatever. It helps in the sense that a bunch of friends could be like, “Hey, let’s start a Wizzyworld game!” and you all start more or less at the same time, or if you bring in somebody new later, you can all leave her and the newbie area alone because you’re not jerks.

The big problem, of course, is that you might lose most of what makes an MMO interesting, which is having a big busy world full of people, and the random social encounters that can ensue. It would mean that many nights, you might be the only one online, which can be a drag (though I still hope that smart enough AIs could make up for that somewhat). It no longer sucks, but it risks being boring, at least by those who love the idea of multiplayer.

But I’ve heard a lot of people say they’re giving up MMOs completely, and going back to single-player games. Would this in-between approach be better? What do you think?

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The problem with MMOs is that the excitement of the “social” aspect is finally starting to wear off and they are finally seen as the bad games that they are.

Their problem is that they are bad, boring games, that would be completely unbearable if you weren’t playing them with your friends.

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I think it’s a good idea Joe. Seems like most gamers probably play with certain people who are friends anyway. At least the folks I know do that. That doesn’t mean they only play with “real life” people but also includes folks they’ve met online. Seems like the only thing that really would be lost is the “make new friends” aspect.

I also think @AcidArrow makes a good point that these games are not really so great as games in and of themselves. They just provide a decent world for people to experience together and it is that multiplayer aspect that actually drives the entertainment value.

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It’s been working for Dark Souls and Bloodborne.

I think the better way to put it is it’s smart multiplayer, linking people who would actively be playing together, and not dumbly dumping people onto a server, hoping they will play with each other.

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There’s already many styles of multiplayer game ranging from 1000 to 2 players, it’s a whole spectrum. Essentially, games like cod are kind of the evolution of mmos. There’s a bunch of persistence to these games. As mentioned before, there’s dark souls (and dying light) that merge single and multiplayer, there’s also GTA 5 which is essentially an MMO but instances 16-32 people depending on if nearby in freeroam or in a dedicated game type.

My suggestion would be to research what’s been done already, might be surprising! In general there’s been a decline in MMOs players due to players basically wanting to play with people they know - and this isn’t thousands of strangers.

As for people being asses to each other, why do you think this is a bad thing? depending on game, it’s a very, very good thing - just not your cup of tea. Things we seek to solve as developers are often the things that remove the fun.

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Go back a few years before MMOs became a thing. Go back a few more before internet match up servers. Every multiplayer game was like this. This meant that often you couldn’t play multiplayer game because all of your friends were busy with life and stuff.

These games still thrive, don’t get me wrong. I’ve got plenty of friends running private MineCraft servers for people they know. Just saying a multiplayer online game is not that revolutionary. :wink:

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I was testing a multiplayer game, without the first M, that was turn based & in real time. This meant that if an action took 12hrs to complete then you went away & came back in 12hrs. It also meant that the people playing could chat & work in strategies to enact when each was in if they were in different time zones. It was an interesting take on multiplayer games.

With your shard idea, you could always let people talk in the forums & if a majority of members in each of 2 or more shards agreed then the shards could merge into one new shard. As another spin on that, if a minimum number of members of a shard agreed then a shard could split into 2 or more smaller shards as long as there’d be enough players left on each to maintain a minimum number for the game. This would allow players to ebb & flow from smaller to bigger to smaller or mega shards, if each shard had a slightly different biome you could create interesting combinations & limit some collectibles & unique items to certain biomes & have others only work in those biomes etc. I’m thinking floating islands, discs on the backs of giant space turtles, different dimensions that occasionally overlap etc.

something like that would probably need the grunt of cloud servers to handle it though.

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No, the difference is that with those older games (and Minecraft servers today, etc.) you have to run the server yourself. This means everybody’s speed is limited by your internet bandwidth and processing power; when your laptop goes to sleep or you take it to work, your friends can’t play, etc.

I haven’t seen a game where I can say “Create a world for me and my buddies” and that world stays online and persistent even when I shut my computer off. But perhaps this is a minor refinement.

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That’s a really interesting idea! You could also have portals between the shards, that allow players to smoothly move between them, but with permissions of some sort that let the receiving end control who can come visit.

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I think it’s a bad thing because (1) it ruins games for me personally, and (2) I’ve heard/read many other people say the same thing. So clearly there is a market segment not being well served because of it. This thread is just to explore a possible evolution to better serve those players. I make no claim that the problem is universal.

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This idea is already coming to life with Shards Online. They also let you script & mod your shard.
I’m really interested with how it’s gonna go.

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Imho that is just a question of tech and money and whom you want to carry those two burdens. I can go to e.g. https://www.nitrado.net and have them set up a Minecraft or Starbound server for my friends and myself and there is that shared, persistent and private online world that is not hosted locally on my computer. All I need to do is pay them and click through a rather simple admin backend. If you want to have that in your game it all comes down to who is going to pay for the server. If you make it a “pay2play” game where people don’t pay for the game but pay for their personal server and manage or outsource your own cloud solution for that, that would be one way to achieve this. I don’t know if there is a market for that approach, but it might work.

I’ve linked those before, but I find it worthwhile to review them every once in a while:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRlYM9F50EQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxBw4AK3RYs

Imho it might be time to take a closer look at your game mechanics first. Would they reward or punish griefing? Is there anything that you could do to incentivize the behaviour you want people to show?

I’ve played quite a few games where people screw each other over and I enjoy the competitive aspects of it. Mean people can make for more interesting adversaries than predictable AIs. I’ve played a browsergame where you compete for galactic dominance of your species and the only way to reach that is by cooperating with other people and betraying them at some point. The whole game was built around diplomacy and intrigue. Since this was by design and people knew what they were getting into I don’t see this as a fault of the mechanics.
Dayz on the other hand often claimed not to want people to play as kill-on-sight-bandits. But it provides no real incentive to be peaceful, no punishment for people that kill other players and if you don’t play it as a hunt-other-players-game it quickly gets really boring because - imho - hunting other players is simply the most fun thing from all the available gameplay options, by far.
7 Days to Die is a bit better imho, because that game provides plenty of fun things you could also do in singleplayer mode and hunting other players isn’t the primary form of entertainment that long-term players can get out of the online play.

In the second video I’ve linked they talk about Natural Selection and how that has one of the best communities. I played NS2 only 2 times but the first game I had was actually one of the best online game experiences I’ve ever had. The game has an option to mark players as noobs and that defaults to “on”. You can change it yourself, but as a noob you don’t even know about this. So I joined a server and in voicechat I heard some pro players talk about how we’ve got quite a few noobs on the server and it wouldn’t be fun for anyone if they played their usual quick rush routine and the match is over in 2 minutes. So they made balanced teams and made it their goal to teach us noobs some of the mechanics because that game has a real steep learning curve, but also provides mechanics to guide players. Every team has 1 commander and he can see the map like it was an RTS game and can give orders to people. “You go here, you go there, you build this here because we will need it later on” etc…
In some other competitive online games like COD or CS though…

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Another talk that covers similar topics, but also touches on board games and goes more in depth on the reasons why people grief in games.

Apparently this video is part 1 of the one above, but I have yet to watch it:

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There are a bunch of games coming out like that, and many that are launched already. Shards Online, Shard of the Avatar and even the new Everquest game are basically like that. You don´t have 10,000 players on a server, you have a hundred or so. I do think MMORPGs are mostly done and minecraft type servers are the future. MMORPGs struggle against WOW because you have to create so many different types of content… solo questing content and then large raid and group content that guilds race to complete.

I think gameworlds where you try to stick between maybe 50-200 concurrents work really well if you have a small but interesting map. Probably the biggest difficulty would be dealing with players who want huge gameworlds, which would feel empty with 200 people on them. You need to sell your players on the idea that small and interesting is better than large and procedural.

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@Martin_H Interesting views. I don’t really agree with it. Possibly to some degree but not much. Because even taking it a step further if the game was designed in such a way as to reward teams for helping out Noobs (can’t be based on the Noob crediting them in anyway because I don’t agree with those guys naive view that all people are just normal people… which I think they mean as people who are not jerks… there are definitely jerks) we’d likely see the elite gamers actively recruiting noobs and welcoming them in with open arms. The trick would be in how to do it right because people could always “game” the game and you’d have elite gamers starting new accounts.

So in the end… I think it still comes back to the people themselves. It is their drive to always be the elite, always be the best of the best that causes them to learn every little strategy and loophole. I think they bring that mindset into the games with them. They don’t have to act like assholes no matter what the games design is. They choose to do so for the rankings or whatever. Anyway, just another way of looking at it.

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@GarBenjamin

Think of it this way - you’re playing with strangers you believe you’ll never see again. This is a formula for something worse than anonymous comments on YouTube.

After all, it does depend on the system and not only the people.

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I hear ya and just don’t share that view. A person can always choose how they act. This goes into the bigger issue where these days society in general seems to blame everything else except the person for what they are doing. I just don’t agree with it.

Sure a lot of people take advantage of the anonymity of the Internet to act like asses. The thing is why are they wanting to act like that to begin with? Nobody is forcing people to go on YouTube or anywhere else and flame people. Why make excuses for that kind of behavior? If something is walking like a duck and talking like a duck… there is a good chance it is a duck. At the least it might as well be treated as one since that is apparently what it wants to be.

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Well, I agree with you both! People can choose to be asses or not, for sure. But at the same time, there are social systems that encourage (or fail to encourage) good behavior. Accountability is a big one, I think. Things like reputation systems can be quite effective, if the players have some reason to care about their reputation — for example, because they can’t simply cancel it out by leaving the game or creating a new account. How can that be? Well, maybe it could be tied to real identities (not likely, but who knows), or maybe you have a system with a focus on positive reputation that takes a lot of time and good deeds to accumulate, like StackOverflow.

Or, the idea I was proposing here, and which apparently some games are trying to embrace: instead of playing with thousands of strangers, you play with a handful of people you actually know. Now there are real-life consequences for being an in-game jerk, and I expect the jerk ratio would go way down (and be self-correcting).

( @Martin_H , when we talk about being a jerk in game, we’re not talking about being competitive. It’s fine if it’s a competitive game and people play to win. We’re talking about things like hateful/hurtful speech, spawn-killing newbies who couldn’t possibly do anything about it, etc. There’s a pretty clear line in most cases between being competitive, and just being the rear end of a horse.)

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Good behavior largely requires jolly cooperation to be necessary, and to punish negative behavior (or at the very least not reward it). Texas can be a real polite place when everyone is packing heat. Creating that kind of environment is not so easy though.

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in fairness, most people who play games like day z do it to be asses to each other, its kinda fun at times u know zombie apocalypse evil people trying to kill you.