MMOG Crowd Control

[matrix3509]

I just signed up for a WoW trial account on the weekend because I am sick of my friends bugging me about how good it is and have I absolutely have to start playing it... and this is exactly right. I felt completely underwhelmed. For a game as MASSIVE as this, there were not very many people hanging around. I assumed the amount of people would be somewhere in the vicinity of MAG x 1000. Needless to say I have stopped playing and will go back to waiting for Diablo 3 to be released.

The whole concept of an MMO is kind of a lose-lose situation for people whose time is an important commodity. Either you sign up on launch day, and deal with the massive crowds/game imbalance in exchange for keeping up (level-wise) with the main crowd, or you sign up later, and deal with early forced grouping quests, with nobody around, in exchange for better game balance.

 

[lomylithruldor]

I think it's one of the only thing that Champions Online did right. Instead of multiple servers, you have one server divided in shards. So, the population in an area will be divided and you change the number of shards depending on the number of people in an area. (ex: If 100 people can quest in Miilenium City without overpopulating the area, you generate an area for each 90 people and divide them evenly between the areas. The 10 people left are for friends to get easily get in the same area.)

That way, if an area is "overpopulated" it only has more shards and if it's "underpopulated", it has less shards.

I think it's important that all shards share a chat channel to ease group finding. In CO, it could be tough to do group quests when the zone chat was shard only, but when the zones shared the same chat, it was a lot more lively and easier to get someone to do group quests.

Another thing that CO did right about this was to include a xp and cash reward to help someone do a quest you already did.

There was some annoying things with the way CO implemented those ideas (like mixing a level 10-15 area with a level 25-35 area (ex: Canada Wilderness)) because the population of the area was divided between the two groups. The limit was also always 100 even if the area was a lot too large for 100 people.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Rather than forced grouping, why not just have an NPC merc team you can hire?

 

[rsvp42]

I've been thinking about this and I think the key is to separate character progression/development from the story, insofar as stats and skills are concerned. Currently, leveling up a character and experiencing the story are inextricably linked, meaning that significant additions to the story will always require things like raising the level cap and offering different sets of gear and whatever. This generally works fine because people like to feel they're improving and that their characters abilities reflect the time they've spent in the game. But with MMO's like WoW, you inevitably have a very top-heavy population squeezed into the later zones. Often times, people will create alts and eventually ignore the story anyway. By making the story optional in a way (although still necessary to the completionist), you free yourself from the typical necessity of leveling.

At its core, leveling serves as a way of directing story progression by directing characters to zones that they can handle. It also acts as a barrier between newer and older characters. Content is accessible based on level. But why? Aren't there other ways of moving through story and experiencing progressively more challenging/interesting content? In WoW, what fundamental difference is there in how you handle monsters at level 10 and at level 80? Aside from new abilities, the combat is generally the same, the difficulty proportionally similar. I suggest that unlocking new content should be handled through other means. Story can be unlocked as you complete certain quests and meet certain requirements. New PvP options can be unveiled and new crafting opportunities unlocked. Character development changes from vertical (1-80) to horizontal (improvement across a wide variety of areas). This would need to be complemented by a combat system that stresses skill (and a little luck) over stats. Gear becomes mostly cosmetic and a measure of status (pretty much what it already is) and abilities offer improvements in gameplay and combat that improve one's effectiveness, but don't make you impossible to beat by a newer character who gets lucky (basically the FPS mechanics mentioned already). It's like when you play an RTS online. Everyone has the same tools available to them, but experienced players know how to use them better. Easy to learn, difficult to master. Essentially, you create an MMO with both a story mode and a multi-player mode, except that they exist in the same space and story mode can be co-op. Let people choose how they want to play and progress.

tl;dr- Don't make story and character progression so completely intertwined. Make progression lateral, not vertical.

 

[Obrien Xp]

Well, guild wars.. screw it.. every MMO debate I get into I always bring it up. Guild Wars does it correctly, well, if you want an MMO with a story it does. If not, well... you're probably playing WoW, no?

Its true, they did do alot of stuff right, that's why I'm still playing it now

With a low lvl cap and most of the game based on what skills your using and how you've set everything up between the party to compliment each-other, most of the game (I'd say 80%) is "end-game" ofc there are the more difficult areas to compliment most of the game being lvl 20 zones. Starter areas are usually pretty full, Kamadan is the trade hub so you'll always see people there, and lots of people just like pre-sear and Shing Jea.

Rather than forced grouping, why not just have an NPC merc team you can hire?

The hard part about that is then once you have that, people will start to only use that. That's what happened in Guild Wars, people used henchmen to fill empty part slots, it worked fine. Then they added heroes, which are like customized henchmen, people don't play with others nearly as much anymore.

 

[SinisterGehe]

I think what Blizzard did was extreely smart.
Random Group instance tool, that allows people to find players cross realm to fight dungeons in.
This made old instances that were totally forgotten since release of The Burning Crusader. But that renewed only small part of the total explorable content, the areas that reguire questing solo and groups outside the instances are still dead (Kalimidor and Eastern-kingdoms. But blizzard got good and cheap idea of redo the old areas with changed areas and environment in The next expansion. This is good and bad at the same time. But the old Areas Outland and Northend will be forgotten again and will end up be Just and only leveling areas. And me as a long time player since original vanilla times miss those old 40man instances that blizzard stop supporting in TBC, miss them.
But we will see. I think Ill still keep playing b's of the good people around me.

 

[Rack]

In theory this has already been solved. In Champions Online there's only one server which creates server like "shards" on the fly. At the start of the game it creates 100 shards of the lowbie zones so you don't have too much overcrowding, then when it gets sparce it cuts down to 2 or 3 shards.

Since no-one plays Champions Online though it's become kind of a moot point. But the idea should work very very well. It does mean a fractured community and forces mechanics to the forefront where they probably don't belong but overall it's a very elegant solution.

 

[NamesAreHardToPick]

An idea I've been playing with (for pen & paper) is to have a game where character levels aren't a permanent measure of power. Let's assume normal MMO stuff: higher level enemies are worth exponentially more XP; higher levels cost exponentially more XP to attain; very powerful equipment requires a high-level character to wear; high level spells cost more MP to cast than a noob has, etc, yadda yadda.

This way there's a risk/reward element, you're NEVER overpowered for lowbie combat because a player wants to maximize their earned XP most of the time. I'll leave my guy at level 1 to walk through Bunny Meadow and pick flowers or whatever materials I need. If there's a noob or two I'll help with a tough fight or something. Crossing into Scary Woods I'll pump my guy up to level 5 and use a bigger sword that I brought for the occasion, that way I'll be able to beat through the spiders. When I get to the Terrifying Dungeon and meet up with my raid buddies we all crank it to level 45 and out come the monster hunter swords and full bling plate of blinging.

Phantasy Star Universe and FF11 had the opposite system. Certain challenge quests in Phantasy Star had their own reduced level caps, and you had to maintain a good set of equipment for those levels in order to have a good chance at winning. I think you can lower your effective level joining a party in FF11 and earn proper XP from low-level monsters as you help mid-level friends out. Those are cool options for making mid-level gear desirable and encouraging grouping between high- and mid-level characters, but I think having characters be level 1 unless they're burning XP would allow for very distinctive world design and combat game mechanics.

 

[ArekExcelsior]

Simple solution:

Get rid of leveling.

The idea that the wolves in THIS forest are ten times as deadly as the wolves in THAT forest is ridiculous. The idea that Villager #4 in Town #2 can beat up everybody in Town #1 one-handed, including the huge bully you needed a group to tackle, is insane. A top-level player can kill everybody else endlessly without breaking a sweat.

Forgetting what it means for group quests, it means also that 99% of all content in an MMO, no matter how huge the MMO is, is totally pointless to visit by a top-level player - especially if his equipment never gets lost, loses durability or is otherwise impermanent.

All zones should have something worthwhile for a top-level player, be it resources to exploit (trees that only grow in one area) or politics and commerce to exploit (logs that fetch a good price in one area).

There should be a plateau that is easy to get to, and that plateau should be extremely difficult to transcend, except by politics (clan/guild effort), and the rewards of such should be communal, not individual (a support network, not better gear).

I'm thinking UO, EVE and the upcoming MO. We need more sandbox MMOs.

That's roughly what I was thinking.

I quit WoW in Burning Crusade. I was sort of enjoying my time up until that point. Changing to Boomkin was endless fun. Except that Outland was terrible. I took too long to level in a barren, boring world.

I hear that Northrend is really exciting. Except that to get there, I STILL have to struggle through Outland.

People tell me the experience amount got lowered. Sure, it did. Still takes me hours of my time doing things I hate to TRY the end game.

People tell me, "WoW is all about the endgame." Wait, so I have to give Blizzard at least a month, often way more, of subscription time just to TRY the game I bought?

And if, after grinding to be viable in PvE raiding, or arena, or battlegrounds, or any of the other high level content, I remain bored, how much money and time have I sunk to try a game?

The early leveling areas need to be demos. They need to get you to the point where your friends are at quickly. I think that the WoW system of pure loot once you've reached max level is also problematic, however. After you're at max level, there should be incredibly slow bonus talents and attributes that build up over time.

The Death Knight quests seem to be the right idea. A few sessions and you're up to 80 with your friends. Start everyone that way, basically.

 

[asterismW]

Silly Shamus. Don't you know cinder blocks are hand-wash only?

 

[Arec Balrin]

The solutions are simple. They are staring MMO devs in the face, but they just simply refuse to wean themselves off Everquest.

Get rid of levels. Or to be more exact: get rid of level-based stats. Levels should only affect what abilities you have; not stats. Re-balance everything: zones, mobs and items and use the same model for levelling that Dawn of War's Last Stand mode had. Now, every zone is a zone viable for anyone to play in.

Blizzard learned, way too late, that regularly scheduled world events have good participation. They could have learned this prior to their first ruining of world PvP in World of Warcraft when they introduced the instanced battlegrounds which they then neglected and the broke-ass PvP honour system. The Tarren Mill VS Southshore battles were the apex of world PvP at the time. Blizz could have analysed it, accommodated it and then expanded it. But they were too obsessed with instancing and Jeff Kaplan's pet raid dungeons.

Two solutions there. If there is a senior MMO dev reading this: do it. DOOO EEET!

EDIT: AAARGH! Should have read the whole thread! Someone scooped me!

 

[Paddin]

Man, this problem is a pain in the ass for MMOs, and in my case LOTRO. I've been playing the game about 6 months now, and its not just the lower level areas that have this problem. I'm currently in a level 50 zone (Eregion if anyones interested) and I can't find anyone to level with, so what usually happens with this type of thing is I complete all the quest chains apart from that final group quest, which I stockpile with the rest, hoping I'll meet someone who also has those group quests. Even on the rare occasion I have met this person, the group quests are greyed out and just don't interest me. Everyone has gone to Mirkwood and aren't likely to come out any time soon, and until I can level up with them I'm stuck exploring the dark depths of Moria on my own. Yay.

This type of thing is why I NEVER play an MMO without a friend or two with me. That way, I know theres someone who I can actually count on to go these quests with. However, my LOTRO companion bailed on me JUST as I was made kin leader, so I'm stuck here now. Not that I don't enjoy the game, its just annoying having to leave so many quests unfinished. Plus everything is more fun with friends.

EDIT: I searched the Escapist for a LOTRO group, and couldn't find one. I'm quite surprised at this (maybe my search is broken?) but just in case, I set up my own LOTRO group

 

[Lerxst]

Simple answer - remove questing and levels. UO never had any issues with level restricted zones or certain quests mainly because it had neither.

Darkfall, another smaller fairly new MMO, has a similar style and it also doesn't have level restrictions (can't remember if there were quests though, but if there were, they were moderate).

Too many MMO's are relying too heavily on questing and "instanced" content these days. Just give us a functional world and a character to play; we'll do the rest!

 

[Ciran]

Well, City of Heroes had an interesting system of sidekicking and exemplaring. With exemplaring a low level character could bring a high level character down to their level, taking away the powers that were too high and lowering their stats. I'm not sure if the XP was changed relative to the character, but the XP debt payment was quickened for the higher level character (you got XP debt when you died, requiring you to pay it off before you could get normal XP to level) and at least if friends were a much higher level than they were, it allowed the lower level character to get help with quests that needed a group without eliminating the XP gained.

The opposite was called sidekicking, where a higher level character could raise a lower ones stats to match the high level ones. It wouldn't grant them any new powers, but again, at least they would be able to quest and gain XP from something much higher than themselves.

It didn't help completely, but it did help a little, and it meant that you weren't completely alone when doing missions just because you were a lower level than a majority of the players and it also meant that the lower level quests could still be a challenge to higher level characters. Of course, CoH didn't have gear or items, everything was based on powers, so I'm not sure how that would work, but it's still a starting point.

 

[Thurston]

Encourage "alt-itis", so experienced players can be found in all levels and all zones.

Build reasons for high level characters to be in the starter zones, so the neophytes can see the vets, and can see their cool stuff.

Introduce a "team leveller" system that allows all members of a team, no matter the level, to be challenged and rewarded in the same mission.


This game already exists. City of Heroes/City of Villains.

It already had the sidekick/exemplar system, which I'm surprised every other MMO didn't steal.

Not satisfied with the best, they improved it to the "supersidekick" system. Makes teaming a breeze. No level jugggling required.

 

[Rhennessa]

I saw Final Fantasy 11 brought up before, but the user didn't go into just how SquareEnix helped solve their leveling quest problems. For starters, FF11 came out before WoW and LOTRO, and is an Eastern game, rather than a US MMO, its key focus was making players work together. You -can- solo in it, but it does not cater to the solo crowd in the least, if you intend to get anywhere in the game, you form a party, join a linkshell, and quest together with people from around the world.

For a while though, there was the issue mentioned in the article, where players would just come across barren wastelands and not see another soul for hours. In a game that keys in on making players work together, that spells doom for anyone who didn't join near the launch of the game. What they introduced last year was a great surprise to everyone involved, the "Level Sync" system. The system works by allowing a fully geared, high level player to join a party with a player of any level range, and activate 'Level Sync', in which their level will be lowered to the highest level of anyone in the group that's in that level range. Their stats and weapon skills, as well as their gear, is all scaled down to that level, and they'll actually receive experience and skill points while partying, since the experience point system scales upward as well.

This way players could play through any dungeon at the level range it was meant for, and get rewarded for it, while helping their friends or even someone they didn't know in the least.

As for WoW, I think it's a shame that so many of the early raids and dungeons aren't even touched anymore. It'd be awesome if a system could be implemented to have scaling dungeons, so you could do a level 80 Strathholme, or a level 70 Black Rock Depths. The loot may not be the top end game heroic stuff, but a token system could still be put in place like there is now, to continue to reward players even if they want to go and enjoy the old instances.

 

[Zorku]

Boo, I hate RPGs, they are so stupid. Burn them in a fire.

Ok, so aside from throwing out the RPG mechanics I think I can weave a lot of these suggestions together without making too huge of a workload for the area designers (it's big enough as it is, you want these things to take even longer to produce?)

This won't totally appease the "get rid of levels" group but it would address the huge gap between players. No mixing of max level characters and low level characters. At first this sounds like I have totally missed the point of the article but here's the turn around: there's a snapshot of each character every ten levels or so that they can go back to.

This handles another annoying issue in MMOs. Although you've killed the pack of wolves that was harassing a town the people are still in a state of having been recently harassed by wolves forever after- and you may even see other players killing those wolves. If each snapshot applies to not a particular location but rather a point in time then the world can be very different. The starter areas can be safe bastions at a point in time when none of the other faction had fought their way into it but later stages can have the same geographic location be war torn or an active battle area.

This doesn't really encourage people to go back to earlier areas except to help out friends/guildies, and now with it being harder to do. Well, here's where the level cap can be blurred a little. Ten would be the obvious point to move on to another area and should ideally require maybe 1/3rd of the quests in the area (maybe even having three general quest lines to follow.) After that there could be an 11th and 12th level available. Reaching the 11th would take several times as much experience as the march from 1 to 10 and the twelfth would really just be there for anyone with way too much time on their hands and definitely not be practical for normal players (nonetheless that addictive experience bar would still be present...)

There would be two motivations for keeping people around for the 11th level of the zone. The first being that this would give some small but noticeable bonus to later stages and the second would be that there can be new raid content for these levels at each stage. For the Icecrown Citadel raid in WoW, Blizzard has started applying a percentage buff that makes killing the bosses easier and in a very similar way fighting the big bad of some newly released raid at max levels could be made more doable with raid specific buffs for having foiled his plans in a much level raid. To mitigate the hassle of grinding through the quests of an area reaching level 11 in the earlier raids for that tier would probably be reasonable, especially with the going through them so many times set up. To actually make sure that these levels don't impact the balance of raid difficulty they wouldn't even need to give any stat gain, they already have a reward in other time periods.

As this essentially distributes end game content through all areas so there will always be players around and then with there actually being more content to see and rewards for doing so players have additional push to participate in group quests. I think at level 10 it would be alright to just allow them to get experience for quests they had already completed (though perhaps slightly reduced?) so that they should help players doing any quest rather than just ones they hadn't seen yet. If players want to grind for the small benefit to other levels so be it; so long as the benefits don't outweigh skill, as in things should be tuned so that a well oiled group of 10th levels can accomplish hard mode style bosses without even the buffs from earlier raids, then it becomes a method for less skilled players to make it through those challenges, but with the drawback that they had to go to all that effort to prepare better for it.

 

[Mavrantzas]

EVE Online manages it. There's free 14-day trials at their site. Try it, you'll be amazed.

 

[Therumancer]

This is an old article but I re-visited it due to a link from the recent CO-play-a-thon thingamabob.

I think a point that is being missed is that group quests, especially early ones, are intended to try and encourage socialization, and to get people to meet each other. This is to prevent everyone from simply logging in with IRL friends or people they know from othe games and online RPGs and remaining more or less cloistered from the rest of the community of "newbs and losers". The problem being that without these dynamics it would be easier for someone who doesn't have any friends (or at least none that play online) to become entirely isolated from the game enviroment.

While I admit I do tend to work with very specific people nowadays in MMORPGs, I met a lot of the people I work with specifically through group quests and working through those storylines.

What's more I will be honest in saying that even when unpopulated (relatively) the newbie areas do tend to have people running around and working on their "lowbie" characters. If their other friends are busy, this creates a situation where new players are going to meet more experienced onces, especially if they cool their jets and wait to solve quests before moving on. This helps them break into the community as a whole.

The problems with MMORPGs will never be entirely solved (the problems described in the article) because it's always difficult for an outsider to break into an established community and/or "go native". That will never change since it's integral to humanity.

Breaking up the group quests into solo quests, or heck, just allowing entire MMORPGs to be completed solo, would basically destroy any kind of social or community dynamic. I mean if you want to play solitary all the time, why not play a single player game which is probably going to be paced better and have a narrative for exactly that kind of thing?

Over the years my thoughts have waffled, and while I do enjoy my solo play in these games (and do it quite a bit) I admit that the actual experience that MMORPGs provide that makes them unique is getting together with five to forty (or more) other dudes and working in concert to do something epic.

When it comes to in game economies and such, that's a touchy subject as most attempts to limit such things have ended in disaster (like Early UO's "resource bank" system).

I also think you need to have more active moderation of games, as I think problems with the enviroment are created by real money intruding on the gameplay beyond subscription fees. Either encouraged or discouraged by the creators (those games set up to provide an avenue for real money to enter the game to begin with tend to be among the worst problem wise, look at say EVE and what the PLEX system did to it). The issue isn't so much people ruining the economy with gathering, but the enviroment for that to happen being created by people who don't play the game for fun, but as a job to farm gold, and then sell that money to lazy people who would rather pay real money than put in the effort to get the cash they need to operate. When some guy can pay like $4 per 1,000 gold in WoW for example, a lot of people are going to do that so they can jump right into the "good stuff" without actually playing the game. That leads to the inflation of prices, and ironically the cost of the goods also being controlled by the people selling the gold who are making that gold by a combination of farming and selling.

Also the increasing "everyone is a lowbie, there are no newbies" attitude born of paranoia over being scammed out of charity doesn't help when it comes to established games. One of the problems I also think needs to be addressed are people who sit around and say demand large piles of gold to do group quests or pwn early dungeons for people. I've always thought that lacked class.

Truthfully, I think the first game to develop some way of preventing almost everyone from becoming totally mercenary to each other (with rare exceptions here and there) is going to go places.