Crafting

This interchange defines everything that is wrong with the idea of crafting in current MMORPGs:
(from http://www.massively.com/2008/10/24/swtor-classes-part-2/)

You can't talk about classes in particular, but are you going to include anything in the game that isn't combat oriented? Smugglers, tradesmen, that sort of thing.

Gordon: We will definitely have crafting.
Rich: The core classes we'll start off with will be based off or heroic, combat oriented experiences ... Star Wars, right? We are going to have crafting, because that's a big part of MMOs. We're going to implement crafting in a way that 'feels' right for Star Wars. For the longest time we struggled with that. You know, crafting at its heart is not really what the universe is about. But one of the designers came up with a great idea, which I can't talk about because it's not implemented yet, of how to incorporate crafting into Star Wars without forcing a hero to do something that's very non-heroic.

This highlighted text captures the abject idiocy of game developers everywhere. what they really mean is:

We haven't found a way to incorporate crafting in any meaningful way into our very limited understanding of what a heroic story/game is, and so we leave it as an afterthought, and it never gets fully developed, and no one is motivated to solve this problem.

Many games have tried, and every one I have tried has fallen miserably short in terms of making crafting meaningful and fun. Here is a list of mistakes that keep recurring in every MMO to date:

1. Focusing too heavily on loot items does not encourage players to get involved in crafting. Often, the items crafted by players in no way compare in power or versatility to readily available loot items. This further limits the will of the player to sit down and craft. Who wants to spend valuable game time making items that no one wants?

2. Crafting is treated like combat (another broken system), such that in order to achieve a high level of skill, one must grind out thousands of useless items. Without getting off track talking about how boring combat is in MMOs, it is important that the IDEAL MMORPG contain minigames that require both player skill and character skill to accomplish the task. This is true of both combat and crafting.

3. Crafting does absolutely nothing to involve the player--all too often, crafting items forces the player to sit and watch a loader bar over. and. over. and. over. ad infinitum, ad nauseam. No one wants to sit and click the same button over and over all night. This automatically places the players who specialize in crafting in the "I am more capable of withstanding horrendous boredom" camp. See above, mini-games are the answer. A set of keystrokes, or typed commands, or some other way to involve the player in creating items. This necessitates keeping the player from having to repeat the game 100s of times to achieve a decent skill. One way to do this is to have a sliding scale for the number of items created on each successful passage of the minigame.

4. Crafted items are listed in readily available databases, such that one is further bored to tears, because you know that in order to make UBER-Widgets, you have to craft 10000 widgets, 1000 intermediate widgets, 1000 advanced widgets, etc. In order to make crafting interesting, there has to be an element of mystery to the process. What happens if I make this out of wood instead of copper? Copper instead of steel? Additionally, the types of items one can create are cookie-cutter, and offer no distinction from items crafted by another player. The Ideal MMORPG will allow players to customize their items, either through ready-made templates, or through open source 3D drafting software, such as that inherent in "Second Life." Of course, this necessitates tightening the EULA so that created items can be kept in theme with the MMO (i.e., no hot pink phalluses of whomping).

5. Current MMOs focus WAY to heavily on the "everyone must be able to become a hero" philosophy, and not enough on the "everyone must be having fun all the time" philosophy. Statements like the one above capture that. Part of the fun in an MMO is attempting to flesh out a character, and find his niche. Of course, no one wants to be a peon data entry clerk, and the Ideal MMORPG should not force someone to be so, but most current MMOs respond to this by giving every player a "hero in a box" formula, such that no achievement has any real meaning. All you have is an avatar with shiny clothes, and you have no meaningful connection with the character you created.

6. (Probably the most important) Economies in MMOs are not equipped to add incentive to crafting in any way. There is no way to create a hero-quest style MMORPG without some kind of economy. How can one rise "against all odds" when there are no real odds? I found this to be true when I played Asheron's call and Star Wars Galaxies. No matter how skilled I became at making something, I could never sell it, because someone was always willing to run through town dropping them on the ground for free. The ideal MMORPG will make players cautious about how they spend their hard-earned gold and loot. As a result of having a stable economy, the works of player-crafters will be central to the daily workings of all members of the server community. NPCs in towns should be selling only player-made items. Scarcity and difficulty should be factors inherent in the player's daily struggle in game. Choosing to do one thing over another should have real consequences. In this way, heroism can result from simply surviving a day in game, and craftsmen can join the ranks of heroes by creating items that helped people survive. (if you craft arrows and bows, and a town manages to survive a zombie onslaught because you were able to create enough in time, you are a hero!).

Crafting, it turns out, is central and essential to making the Ideal MMORPG work. It is the basis for the game's community, and automatically encourages players to form relationship. Unfortunately, too many MMORPGs leave it on the editing room floor, or add it as an afterthought, because they really don't understand how economies work, and thus, can not create them in an MMO.

Classes, Schmasses!

In the ideal MMO, classes are things earned by achievement, not tracks on which one starts out. Allowing the player to choose a class at the outset of character creation seems like a great way to enable free will in game play, but such choices almost always manifest not as liberating actions, but as limiting ones. Automatically, when you click that button and choose a class, you remove entire sets of opportunities from that character, and you deny one very fundamental aspect of humanity that becomes even more amazing in game-play--the ability to create and recreate oneself.

It is much more desirable to explore what one's character *might* become instead of choosing from day one what he is and shall always be. The ideal MMORPG allows one to play a character according to his own wishes and goals, and does not hinder that development by saying, "No. You chose to be a 'fighter' therefore you can never wear robes."

While it is utterly important to make sure that classes not be restricted in silly things like what clothing they can wear, this issue goes much, much deeper than the aesthetic.

Arriving in the ideal, MMO, a player should have every opportunity available to him, and be limited only by what choices he refuses to make.

In the real world, we have only one life, and so, changing our minds about what we are to be bears a heavy cost. The ideal MMO can make trying on new identities, careers, and roles very fun and enjoyable, but only if they are actually available for exploration.

Never should a player be put in the position of saying, "I am a level 40 mage." This is the kind of statement one makes when asked by the GM what character he would like to use in the game. Statistics like level, classification, skill level, etc., are all resources used by the GM to make a challenging and enjoyable adventure for the player. They are supposed to be forgotten by the player, who is engrossed in enjoying that adventure.

It's one thing to say, "You aren't strong enough to lift that axe," or "You don't know enough about nature magic in order to use this staff as anything but a walking stick," but it is completely another to say, "You will never be able to wear this armor because you chose to be a mage."

This is one thing that Asheron's call mixed up and confused. On the one hand, one could acquire any of the skills in the game, regardless of his starting class. On the other, the classes so stunted certain skills that it became pointless to choose some of them. This brings me to my next point. Discrete character classes both hinder player's choices, and reveal bias in the developers.

Everyone has played an RPG where it was obvious that the developers would like you to choose a particular class to complete the game. We all have felt the disappointment inherent in getting midway through the adventure, only to realize that we lack a skill that is crucial to the movement of the plot, because we decided to think outside the box and play, "WARRIORS OF STEEL" as a magic only wizard class, more than likely added at the end of production at the request of marketing folks who realized that a warrior-only game will alienate a large group of consumers.

The answer to this is not to do what many MMOs have, i.e., retooling classes, adding to the list of classes, renaming classes, nerfing/boosting classes, or allowing multi-class characters. The answer is to do the hard work inherent in allowing characters to develop themselves.

Perhaps in-game there is a training school where one can earn a title: Royal Guardsman, or "Wizard of the Second Degree" but apart from plot-driven or character assigned titles, there should never be anything resembling a hardwired class into which players must fall. This is one thing that "Elder Scrolls" did right. They had classes, but it was a much more interesting experience if you created your own "adventurer" class. All skills and abilities should be made available to all characters, and only their choices should dictate what they choose to use or to be.

Paul's RPG Background

After writing three posts to the blog, DW Reminded me that I had not properly introduced myself to the reader, so I have decided to come back and redo the first post so that you have some idea where I came from, and why I have authority to make sweeping generalizations about games :).

I grew up in the days before the Internet. From 1985-1989, I dabbled in table-top RPGs and card games like Dungeons & Dragons, Gamma Wars, Top Secret, Cyberpunk, Star Wars, Up Front, and a few others whose names I can't recall. Most of my actual experiences with these games were negative, but in my imagination, they remained the most awesome idea ever: a game that allows you to use your imagination to create and play in any story you choose! Unfortunately, I never met anyone who was into those games that didn't have some kind of major baggage or social ineptitude. (Perhaps I'll dedicate a future entry to these characters...) At any rate, when I wasn't feebly attempting to play RPGs or talking about how awesome they were with the few normal friends I had, I was reading Choose Your Own Adventure books (mostly fantasy stuff, with a little sci-fi every now and then). I was also reading a bunch of straight-up fantasy, sci-fi, and horror novels. I read Tolkein and Lewis twice, and most of Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality, along with almost all of Gibson's cyberpunk stuff, and many, many titles by Stephen King. I also became an avid collector of Marvel X-Men comics in high school.

When personal electronics began to come on the scene, I spent a lot of time playing on the Atari 2600 at friends' houses, but my own consoles were an Odyssey 2 and an Intellivision with Intellivoice. I did get razzed by my Atari friends for having those two consoles. I was one of the first kids in my group of friends to have a Tandy 1000, which turned out to be a pretty kick-ass game machine in the day. I learned to type by playing Sierra's Quest games (mostly King's Quest, but also Space Quest, Hero's Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry):
siwm/
swin/
sim/
CRAP!!!!
SWIM/
whew!
Look in teh chest/
-you can't do that here.
WHAT!? I'm right in front of it, oh,
Look in the chets/
-You can't do that here.
OMG WHY NOT!!! Oh..
Look in the chest/

To this day, I have never been formally trained in IT or in electronics of any kind, and yet my whole family considers me the go-to guy for tech issues. Everything I learned about technology in some way relates to my obsession with games. Almost every new title I brought home required some kind of edited Autoexec.bat or Config.sys file, so my buddies and I would get together and force the Tandy to play the game we wanted to play. I was pretty good at working with MS-DOS, and when windows came out, that knowledge helped me to understand and make it function better.  I played many different games constantly throughout my teens and twenties, but my favorites were always the fantasy/RPG types.

Other Fantasy/RPG titles I played on the PC were:

• Zork
• Wishbringer
• The Bard's Tale (I can still hear my PC's internal speaker squawking out the theme song for this one!)
• Castle Wolfenstein
• Defenders of the Crown
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• Lands of Lore
• Loom
• Myth I, II, & III
• Oregon Trail
• Pool of Radiance
• Sid Meier's Covert Action
• Some of the Ultima titles
• Prince of Persia
• Thief: The Dark Project (and the two sequels--LOVE THIS SERIES)
• Vampire: The Masquerade

In the early 90s, when one of my tech buddies showed me electronic mail, and later, X-windows, I was HOOKED on the potential for internet gaming.  I skipped the BBS culture completely, and dived into the realm of IRC RPG.  I dabbled a bit in MUDs, but the lack of graphics made it a hard sell.  When Diablo came out in 1997, it became my world.  To this day, I sometimes wake up with the haunting theme from Tristram stuck in my head (Shtay a wh-ile and lishten!)

Imagine my thrill when Asheron's Call was released in 1999 (somehow, I never played Ultima Online--to this day, I have no idea how I missed this!)!  Finally, my two loves had merged: the ability to create a character and play as that character in a graphical world with lots of other players online!  Everquest came out that same year, but I only had enough money for a subscription to one game, so I only played AC, but many of my friends online were Eversmack addicts as well.  In addition to AC, I have also played:

• Anarchy Online (played an engineer, but only for a couple weeks)
• Dark Age of Camelot (played as Artfull Dodger, an Albion assassin)
• Earth & Beyond (Played Mereor, a merchant)
• EVE Online (played a free trial, but quit when I saw how time consuming it was going to become)
• Neverwinter Nights (not technically an MMO, but I did play it online a few times)
• Shadowbane (I played a Shadowclan Firekei--one of my best MMO experiences ever!)
• Silkroad Online (plug and chug, non stop, no real RP)
• Star Wars Galaxies (my first real attempt at being a crafter)

These days, I am mostly a console gamer, but I continue to wait for the release of a truly great MMORPG; one that merges all that is great about table-top gaming and computer grpahic adventures; the Ideal MMORPG!