As someone who works for still one of the largest online service providers in the world, I always start twitching when I see MMP providers asking for your patience when there’s an outage. Particularly on networks of less than 1M users. My own company has its own rep and market caricature to contend with, but they honestly can’t come close to anything I’ve seen with the daily restarts and unplanned outages of certain online games. I genuinely don’t understand how the gaming professionals who run MMP’s don’t seem to be able to equate uptime with subscriber loyalty. People are paying monthly costs for 24/7 service. I’ve never seen or heard of an industry that seems to promote and request a personal relationship with their customers, but then is baffled by user hostility when there’s bad news. I don’t see GM or Nestle or Gilette trying to be liked by individuals so much. I’ve always been confused why people like Smed or McQuaid take the time to argue or virally promote their projects on private forums. Maybe it’s damage control. But seriously, it can’t actually help. What users first care about I think is availability and stability. After that, then the nuanced complaints over content can occur, but consistent delivery is job#1. Having executives trolling private player forums feels eerie and unnecessary if uptime was good.

HRose is right when he references Utnayan over at FOH today who scoffs at the provider appeal for “trust” or faith in development. To be fair to the professional in the thread (McQuaig), I don’t know whether he specifically asked for this, but I have seen this kind of appeal repeatedly on official forums before in many games and it bugs me too. McQuaig is correctly trying to describe that MMP’s are works in progress, and while they are expected to be maintained and extended by players after launch, they still need a long and iterative development cycle to create. I can concur — all online services need tweaking and continued testing and maintenance, precisely because they are live services. But as a live service they should support what they are charging for access. It’s a reasonable customer expectation to have stability in a game at launch, and continued stability over one’s subscription period. Outages always occur, since most MMP architectures aren’t close to 5-9′s (99.999%) reliable like telcos. But still there has to better access than what many of us have experienced over the years.

For me, the idea that MMORPG providers require your trust and your sympathy is ridiculous a priori since it’s a commercial relationship. Fundamentally, what they really require and want is brand loyalty and good marketing for conquest, and what the customer requires is good service delivery. Pretending there’s anything else out there in the midst of non-access or buggy deployments is just disingenuous. And truly, what pisses off players more than anything is being fed false expectations.

Chris Bateman, who always seems to have something interesting to say, has published his notes of a talk by Ernest Adams at the GDC. Adams is also a member of Bateman’s International Hobo group. The presentation was entitled ‘A New Vision for Interactive Stories’. Adams’ notes that “There is, in effect, a “credibility budget” in any interactive story,” such that he concludes: The talk comes to a close by reiterating the idea that credibilility is the currency of all narrative, and that the social contract of role-playing mediates the tension between interactivity and narrative. No other form of interactive entertainment tries to be all things to all players. Why should interactive stories have to shoulder that burden? It’s time to stop apologising for not working miracles and get on with the job of creating interactive stories.

This is not as easy as it seems and the talk starts by proposing that the “standard” models of narrative (Aristotle, Joseph Campbell and Robert McKee) can’t be applied wholesale for interactive stories (I *always* cringe when I see those first two welded together). By the time Adams’ gets to the above conclusion he has gone through other more modern approaches and reviews branching and emergent narratives and particularly a “procedural approach in which situations are functions and people are parameters.” There’s not enough in the blog to know how descriptive he was, but these kinds of references always remind me of formalist/narratology methods. I don’t know, but interactive story telling might benefit more from the work of Lakoff & Johnson than anyone else recently. Adams himself ends up with an approach that apparently depends on knowing the author’s intention or sticking with their vision (“credibility”). Role-playing does not mean total freedom – it still has rules and a magic circle. When you play a game, you must accept the premise of the game.

I think that’s pretty fair, and maybe Adams’ point is for writers and not readers — or more clearly, for players; namely, that writers shouldn’t use self-irony and bunny hop on the magic circle because it’s their job to present the story with narrative integrity. They should write stories that are faithful to the genre (in this case, role playing) and not use devices or narrative techniques to call attention to their self-creation in fear of losing the immersiveness of the narrative. This is actually interesting, because the idea of keeping to the spirit of a work is pretty much dead, but in interactive storytelling it might be required. In order to have successful role playing you have to keep the writer bounded to the genre, but you also have to have them use techniques that keep the player within the genre (role-playing) as well. I like that. Means no goblin engineers mouthing gangsta slang. Solid.

From a humourous post over at Krones’. Funny because the quotes seem genuine — not a lot of over-emotion: Just simple amazement and frustration over the feature set in Vanguard Beta. CombatYou’d think this is fun but it really isn’t. They talked up a huge game about how Vanguard’s combat involves more than just hitting Auto-Attack and hoping the monster runs out of Hitpoints before you do. You get to see a monsters attack ahead of time, and simply choose whatever button is flashing to deflect it. That’s it, that’s their huge “next generation” improvement to the boredom of playing a melee: waiting for icons to flash and then click on them hoping the server lag doesn’t cause the spells to timeout. Solo’ing is non-existant…

Well the lack of soloing doesn’t surprise me, but not coming up with innovative more real time combat is disappointing. Combat should be motor skill (mouse/key) *and* intelligence for tactics. This is pretty much just reaction time, whack-a-mole, by the sounds of it, that already exists in every MMO that has a timer of specials. I mean having “specials” and discrete values over everything — AND displaying those values — and players-as-limited-time-punching-bags is not innovative. Let’s hope they have something else. TradeskillsI’ve only tried tradeskilling once, and was amazed at the time involvement. According to the forums, it takes just as long as combat leveling to level while tradeskilling. Apparently its like EQ2, you sit there and some bars go up and down and you have to mash flashing buttons until you “finish” a product. Apparently some guy did this for days and days and is level five and makes “Grade D table legs”.

Harvesting takes for fucking ever. You have to group with other harvesters and you fight trees like you would a monster. Thats right, you need to get certain harvesting classes too, like “gleaners” and “refiners” in your group, and you sit around wacking some tree until the tree dies and then you get some loot. You then have to rest, since you get “tired” while wacking trees all day.

Ok, that’s just funny. And dumb. Someone (McQuaid presumably) equates the same playstyle of combat with crafting. WHY? Since combat is about conflict and players who play combat classes want conflict, and since the grind is all, you need unending conflict for advancement. But all they’ve done is take the exact same paradigm and stuck it on crafting. In this light, crafting isn’t about innovating, discovering, practicing, or *quality* of product, it’s about production. Crafting is fundamentally about reconciling reproduction and innovation. But here there’s no customer created content or persistent data so crafting is just about mass production. And the same applied to harvesting — it’s about hoarding, so they take the same model of conflict and items dropping from mobs and use it. So harvesting isn’t about knowledge, or searching, or quality or species differences by area? Anyways. DiplomacyParley… This is the best new “feature” of this great “next generation mmorpg”. You have to parley with the npcs to get your quests. This is yet another ridiculous time sink. Thats right, when you want to talk to a npc about a quest, it opens a parley window where you fight the npc like a monster using arguments. You have the “dirty joke” spell, which lowers his liking of you, so then you have to reply with a “nice compliment” which then makes him like you more but then you have to keep the conversation interesting so you attack using a “interesting story”…I’m not making this shit up, you basically hammer keys until the conversation bar reaches the end(without other bars getting too low, its exactly like EQ2’s crafting system) and you win the “parley”.

Here’s what is so great about it. EVERY SINGLE NPC makes you parley with him to get quest info. What is funny about it is that 95% of them have no quests or interesting info to give you, so you go from npc to npc parleying, mashing keys, until you “win” the “encounter” and you get nothing from it.

So again — the intention seems good but the execution sounds horrible. You want to have a means for NPC’s to have character and you want the effects of PC’s on those characters to matter. You also want some sense of the fun of negotiation and persuasion. But this sounds more like a puzzle game because it’s the same combat model again. There’s nothing persistent with the PC, like their reputation? There’s only specials to fight the NPC to give up the quest? You socially-fight the NPC and they drop the quest? Jeez… This will be very frustrating, particularly if there’s no reward, like a reputation enhancement.

All told, this seems close to what I expected. All the ideas sound great (better combat, deeper crafting, social NPC AI’s), but the implementation is too punitive for me.