How many people does it take to get the "mmo" feel?

#1 I would recommend reading "Reality Is Broken" by Jane McGonigal. She touches on the MMO subject in the book. One thing that struck me was that many MMO players play alone, but together. Sometimes players will band together to defeat a particular boss or task, but a lot of the time prefer to play alone. A lot of the time they play alone and just report on status. So it probably depends upon which player you are talking to for determining if the MMO "feeling" is there. I know that while playing MoM that I often really wanted to be alone while playing. Other times I wanted to mooch XP off people or just hang out. So I would be one that would prefer to have both dynamics. Then again, most of the time in MoM there are not that many people connected at the same time. Is it an MMO? I don't know. But my experience matched pretty dead on with the book's findings.

#2 Yes, many people play alone a lot, but what motivates me for example is if you can meet others and measure yourself in duels, so you know how good you are.
So you do not need that much players, but you need a core group that is always there, to give the illusion, that it's crowded. The average player will not meet all the 50000players anyway a few hundred will do for the first.

#3 After posting this I searched around for MMOs and the number of players. It is interesting as some MMOs can have 1000 players in the same zone while others limit to 8. I read something about the design philosophy behind some of this and it was interesting. One person suggested you can keep it from being empty by having N number of people in a zone and spawn NPCs to help fill up the world. I thought that would be kind of a neat idea.

#4 Population density is interesting in this respect. Playing an MMO I like to occasionally run across someone wandering the wilderness like I am. I like occasionally saving them from defeat, or having someone come by and save me. This sort of interaction mirrors my personal version of real life - I see people, sometimes I help them for no reason and sometimes they do the same. So part of it is the size of your world. If I recall, UO launched with something like 50k players, but the shard maximums were much lower than that.

Games like Guild Wars take that away. Zones were instanced so you were always wandering the countryside alone unless you intentionally grouped with others.

#5 As Frank had said, the MMO "feeling" is dependent upon how an individual chooses to spend his/her time in the game. The size of your "world" will also determine how "crowded" the world appears. More people in a smaller zone makes it seem crowded while the same number in a very large zone will make it seem sparse. In many games this is where instancing comes in. To maintain population control as well as to meet server capabilities, games will create instances of a zone in order to main a particular population "feel."

I think it also depends on the MMO design. UO was unique in that it was more than simply combat. It had a sandbox nature which allowed other activities. Crafting was quite different as well and was useful. A good example is a game called Star Wars: Galaxies.

Star wars: Galaxies was a failure in some peoples' eyes, but the game was extremely successful from a marketing perspective. Like UO, SWG had a very loyal following of players and offered a truly social community. Crafting mattered as every item (except heroic jewelry) was craftable, and crafting was a class in itself. There were purely social, combat, and entrepreneurial classes, player housing, town management, and plenty of things to occupy peoples' time even when they didn't feel like engaging in combat. This means that players are likely to be logged into the game more often, which maintains population.

However, when you think of "crowd" are you considering simply active players, or a truly active in-game community? Most MMOs today can maintain enough players to make the game-world appear to be populated, but if the in-game community keeps itself tied to guild/clan-only interaction, then such players might as well seem like NPC fillers. Most MMOs are now designed around guilds and not individual social interaction between all players.

it is my opinion that MMOs which create opportunities for people to truly engage with each other outside selected "grouping" tent to generate a more realistic social "crowd" than those which base everything upon group instancing and self-efficiency. That is, having players who offer things that other players cannot offer makes them unique and highly regarded.

For instance, in SWG, entertainers were very important as most buffs required interaction with entertainers. Entertainer buffs we faster and more potent if the entertainer was performing in a cantina (a social hub) which made cantinas quite popular. You would go into a town and would want to find a cantina, and they were usually quite busy. This generated great opportunity for social interaction.

Additionally, crafting was a class (called engineer) and these people made all the items you could ever need. This made these players popular as well. Combat classes were another aspect.

#6 This is interesting:
SWTOR Review.

A major complaint according to the article is it felt too much like WoW. Go figure... Perhaps the "feeling" needs to include the "is it fun?" test rather than the "does it feel like x?" test.

This would be the second MMO someone has tried to make in the SW universe. I don't think the devs really understand how to make a good game in the first place. Either that or they are being restricted from "making it fun" in the first place. I know on KOTOR 2 they took out a lot of cool content because Lucas did not like it. Did EA do the first SW MMO? Do they do a lot of MMOs that make it?

#7 If i recall the area around the banks in ultima online was quite busy with chatter, from people advertising their wares to the random talks between friends.

I found this picture that i think illustrates this pretty well.

And obviously, one from the grand opening, when Lord British was killed.

#8 @Frank EA did not do the first SW MMO. SWG (Star Wars Galaxies) was originally managed and run by Verant Interactive (through Lucas Arts). Later the game was given exclusive control to Sony Online Entertainment (Who originally only supported the online servers). The game was successfull in that it only cost 300K in initial development and received more than 2 million in revenue directly from that investment. It is estimated that total production and overhead for SWG reached 4 million and total revenue generated was more than 12 million dollars. This is why I consider the game to be successful from a marketing perspective.

However, due to changes made by Sony, after they gained full control, the population dwindled drastically. From a population of close to 500,000 players to less than 100,000. However, the game managed to maintain approximately 40-50 thousand subscribers for many years to come. near the end (in 2011) the community still contained over 10,000 subscribers. How many were very active is not really known.

SWTOR was flawed from conception but will be successful simply because people love Star Wars, and it is "fun enough"....barely (in my opinion).

#9 @Richard: I get the feeling that today's MMO try to break up the "crowd" as much as they can because they don't want to deal with the implications of player to player interaction (someone's fun is someone else's annoyance).

@Patrick: I do mean concurent players, when does it feels like you are part of something much bigger, especially in the days of heavy instantiation.

@Frank: I think that, same with UO, StarWars galaxies is one of these "happy mistakes" of mmorpg design that nobody dare to produce anymore. Pretty much every MMO out there is going for the formula largely used by WoW: "Singleplayer/co-op game with an always online DRM". It's not about creating a massive, open, multi user experience anymore.

#10

Quote:It's not about creating a massive, open, multi user experience anymore.

Kind of like when "alternative" music isn't alternative anymore.

#11 From those old UO screenshots (I beta tested that) I see that you actually liked something that I really didn't about that game - it was just too crowded. Busy is one thing - unable to move is another entirely. I prefer the "massive, open" part of your post. ;p

As for every game looking like WoW - they're following the Rule of Least Surprise/Principle of Least Astonishment - If you do something in an MMO you expect a certain type of response. People expect MMOs to be a certain way, then complain when they're all that way.

#12 @Richard: Hey i'm not saying it was perfect, i'm just saying that gave you that feeling of being part of a huge world.

Now the only huge and massive things in these games are the buildings and landmarks, which seems to all be designed to house giants...

#13 Sorry for derailing in nostalgia. Most multiplayaer "action" games seems to run on a 16/32/64 player format which usually depend of the map, or of the type of experience they are advertising.

Now from as long as i remember, you generally do not interact with this many players in a regular MMO game session, raid dungeons in WoW appear to range in the 10 to 25 players. And battlegrounds 10 to 40+.

Now those are specific instances, the openworld part of these games (if they even have one) the population is more sparce and there is pretty much no player to player interactions beyond chat (excepted in realm vs realm zones)

#14 You've lost that MMO feeling...oh, oh, oh, ohhh...

Sorry, could not resist...

As far as MMO chat, I was thinking about that for making it so people can play alone-together. Chat is relatively inexpensive and a server could handle a lot of it. However, the experience itself could primarily be single player. For multiplayer I was thinking of peer to peer as the game I am pursuing would not be competition with each other. More of a support group type dynamic.

So I think it may be possible to capture the positive aspects of an MMO without an actual MMO. If that makes sense at all?

#15 I've been leaning toward a "Large" rather than "Massive" online game model for a while now. I want to make a game like Neverwinter Nights that would allow up to 128 players to play simultaneously, work together in groups. play solo, build or modify parts of the environment and allow "dungeon masters" to create encounters or quests on the fly. It would probably need to follow NWN's model pretty closely - a regular client game that can connect to the server and a separate administrator game that would allow the dungeon masters to control NPC's directly, spawn things, give things to (or take them from) the players, change the weather, etc.

Sort of in line with some things Frank said, I've always wanted to use "seed NPCs" to create hazards in the wilderness areas of a game - NPCs who will actively recruit other NPCs to become part of a group of bandits, or an alpha wolf that will start a pack. These could be constrained by terrain and resources (like food, traffic, population) and would provide move of a "living" feel to the world in general.

#16 @Richard,
I wanted to do this kind of dynamic is Oblivion to test this out. I was even thinking that the player could acquire dungeons by hiring mercenaries and this could maintain sections of a dungeon. Of course some sort of economy would have to worked out. Such as acquiring a mine could bring in revenue to pay mercenaries and fund more expeditions.

#17 I posted this in another thread, but moved it here because it was a better place for it.

------------------------

Perhaps back in 1990 before people learned how MMO servers worked, we all thought they supported hundreds of thousands of people.

Now-a-days, the term MMO is extremely broad and very subjective, with a plethora of technologies that are used to handle quite a variety of strategies to handle the playerbase.

You have games calling themselves MMO which only support <50 players in any one zone, and server clusters that support "one world" with an impressive cloud-like setup capable of handling any number of players in any area of the single-world game.

In all honesty, most MMO's don't simultaneously hold thousands of players in a single area. Very few even have hundreds in a small area, and some of those are known to be laggy messes because of it, while others seem to pull it off better.

My point is that MMO = MO. It's all the same thing: a very broad definition of a multitude of different technologies that handle what only appears to be the same thing: a huge world with "hundreds of thousands of players". In reality, most of them are actually extremely small worlds of <30 players per area. Even WoW, the monstrous sized MMO, is only monstrous sized in number of servers- not anything special in players on said servers.

I think it is worth posting this in case anyone is looking at MMO or Multiplayer design. I'd argue strongly that one must ask themselves (or their designer) "How many people will be on screen at any given moment?" followed by "Why?" There is little reason to make some of these MMO's a MMO. In fact, some AAA titles have understood this and decided to implement a lobby system or extreme instancing instead. While others take the opposite design and literally have only a single massive world with awesome hardware behind it.

In most MMORPG's, the number of people playing in the same immediate area is very, very small in at least 90% of circumstances. Furthermore, the number of people in any one large area is also typically very small. Even in primetime among a highly population WoW server with a waiting Queue to get in, a simple /who in a specific zone will not gather more than 30-60 players. These zones may not be massive, but they are certainly not small. There are very games which were plagued with massive worlds and even when full to brim with population felt entirely empty (ex. Vanguard). The job of a designer isn't just to funnel players to the same areas (Rifts in RIFT, for example) but also to work with networking professionals to possibly adjust design to not require such robust networking code or hardware.

I digress, but for example: If it would not hurt gameplay much, then why not have better, faster client/server connections in smaller areas and an entirely different way of handling larger areas or far away characters? It is more important that a character is low latency in your immediate area. Less important that they are accurate from extreme ranges. Even a sniper gun would simply move the player to the zoom area, giving more accurate latency of that player. Less packets to send/deliver, I can only imagine means a less clogged connection for everyone. This is just one example of many which might be worth developers thinking about when designing their games. After all, none of it matters. What truly matters is the Player's perception & the Company's bandwidth/server cost. If the player perceives little to no lag, then there will be little to no lag. If the player perceives a huge brimming world full of hundreds of thousands of players- then it is irrelevant if they are never connected to a server with more than a handful of others.

It would be interesting for there to be a wiki or website devoted to the various types of MMO network structures, new definitions to define these different engineer methods, and clarification that MMO doesn't even have to necessarily mean complex. One could setup a game that does less than what some MO games, but make it look like and even act like the majority of MMO games.

I'm a very strong opponent of people who believe the aspect of an MMO is somehow infinitely larger than the challenge of regular multiplayer, or that a amateur programmer is capable of making a MO but not a MMO, when there is very little difference unless you are wanting a true MMO or something as complex as EVE's server system.

Of course, the confusion is probably due to so many different games calling themselves MMO's when they are hardly comparable to some of the larger AAA titles.
Fortunately for my argument, even AAA titles tag themselves as MMO despite being nothing more than a glorified MO.

#18 This really inspires me to flush out the design of my ultimate game further. I have hundreds of ideas that are quite all over the place, a general direction, and a good feel for which ideas would work best in my design.

Unfortunately, this will never happen until I organize these ideas. This is always when I realize which ideas hold higher value, and usually scrap out a large portion of them so I keep only the ones that fit the ultimate goal.

I really wish I was taught in school how to structure design better. It really, really helps to know tips like how one should focus on the goal and make sure things fit with said goal.

It took me years of thinking and decades of experience simply to come up with the ingenius idea of asking myself, "How many players are actually ever on screen at any given moment?" I was shocked to discover how low this number really was. Not that I thought it was 100,000+, but that without thinking you kind of assume it is. The first thought immediately places that number <1000, and further research really makes you question if thousand-people servers are truly the answer or if hundred-people smaller servers would be better for community.

#19 @RJAG,
I guess when I think of MMO I think of something like WoW that has a server farm/cloud that supports millions of players at the same time. I do realize they are not in the same zone, but this is a far different game than a MO that supports one zone or is peer to peer. To me the "massive" denotes the server end and really has little to do with the client. I would say a game server system that supports millions of users to be far different and more massive than a game that has 50 players total.

You are right in that the game play may not be much different. However, in Eve Online there may not be 1000 players actively battling, but it is not uncommon to have 1000 players trading in the commerce areas. That is going to require quite a bit of server power. Hence the server delineation. I guess I could call it Big Arse Server Farm MO, but MMO does suffice.

#20 The system doesn't support millions of users though. To my knowledge, rarely has any game supported a million of users online at the same time, and I am skeptical of those who claim to have done so. Not that it is not possible, but that it is not the norm even among the most popular of games. The number of subscribers online at any given moment (largest game goes into the millions) is relatively small (not a million). I believe WoW has boasted before almost making a million and LoL has boasted "1.3 concurrent users" on a popular day. LoL never has more than 10 people in a game, so I don't think that is much of an accomplishment on the server end.

The BUSINESS does support millions per MONTH with their combination of tech support, web support (website, downloads), bandwidth, and multitude of servers, all combine to support the millions of people.

Each shard/realm itself however only supports thousands of players, not millions. I don't know how "Shards" like WoW work, but I assume there's Shards tend to have limits for performance reasons (or else they lag horrendously) and this limit is not even in the tens of thousands, but instead is in the thousands.

I can't really find any real info on it, but from what I gather from google and a few different people, WoW server used to be "Full" at 5k, and might have been upgraded to be "Full" at 8k. I am still curious as to the max load of a single zone in WoW. Many games I've played have split players in multiple instances of the same zone once the zone had around 60-100 players in it.

Although one could argue what the definition of "server" means among what is now becoming a cloud or farm type setup, the number of max players in a single "Shard" still remains to never exceed a few thousands. Of course EVE would be different, but like I said it goes into arguing what a "server" is. One could argue EVE has a unique "Shard" for each area.

I am very curious as to the power of a single server itself. I imagine there would have to be some sort of bandwidth limitation to a single server simply because of the limitation of the wires that go from the server farm's end location to the various nearby internet/networks?

Or do WoW server farms look like this?



I am not very knowledgable on networks or how information is passed when the load is so incredibly heavy. I was always curious how server farms like those in Chicago (WoW farms that host MULTIPLE Shards in a single cluster) work without bloating the actual internet cables that are in the ground.