Instancing and Tailor-made Content

The best feature of MMORPG are other players, your guild, your friends, the people you log on for long after the game itself stopped holding you in thrall. The worst feature of MMORPG are other players, player killers, griefers, kill-stealers, ninja-looters, the guys camping your favorite hunting spot. Clever game designers try to maximize positive player interaction, while minimizing the negative aspects of other players.

Methods to limit negative player interaction by making specific actions impossible have had some limited success. Griefing by player killing has been eliminated from some games by eliminating PvP. But all tries to enable "fair" PvP and eliminate "unfair" PvP have up to now failed. The problem of kill-stealing hasn't been satisfactorily solved either. FFXI has a system in which nobody but your group can hurt a monster once combat is initiated, but the system fails in combats against multiple enemies. And in many games players feel a negative impact when they are in a zone with too many other players, either in the form of lag, or by zones getting over-hunted.

One possible solution to many of these problems is instancing, the creation of virtual places that are not persistent, but only appear on demand. One form of this, to my knowledge, exists only in City of Heroes: Instancing of whole zones. When too many players are trying to go to the same zone, a mirror image copy of that place is created. Thus the number of players in a zone can be limited, without shutting anybody out. You get less problems with lag, and the player to monster ratio doesn't get too high.

A more frequently observed instancing is the creation of random dungeons (already discussed last month), or instancing special encounters. The big advantage of a virtual world is that two players or groups going through the same cave entrance do not have to come out in the same cave. And the fact that the first group entering the cave did slay the dragon does not mean that there will be no more dragon to slay for the second group. Final Fantasy XI even had cut-scenes which only you could see when clicking on an NPC; everybody else just saw you standing there motionless in front of that NPC.

The trick to make instancing work against negative player interaction, without destroying positive player interaction, is to carefully study in which situations players want to meet other players, and where they would prefer not to. Players generally prefer cities or other meeting places to have a good number of other players in them, so they can chat and trade. City zone instancing should only happen if large number of players in that zone would otherwise cause heavy lag. CoH does that well. On the other extreme, if a player or a group is on a mission to kill a specific monster, they would much prefer not to see any other uninvited players there.

The intermediate situation, hunting of random monsters just for experience and random loot, is more difficult to handle, because it can have both positive and negative player interactions. It is very nice to have another passing player cast a heal or other beneficial spell on you while you are in a tough fight. Even having somebody else kill the monster you were fighting can be positive, if you had bitten off more than you could chew, and the other player came to your rescue. But from there to the negative interaction of kill-stealing is just a tiny step, and it is difficult to design a system which allows the one and forbids the other. The best solution is probably to offer hunting both in outdoor zones open to everybody, and in random dungeons open only to your group, so everybody could chose how much he wants to interact with other players.

Outdoor zones may need to be more dynamic and reactive to the presence of players. Currently in most games you have a fixed number of spawn points in a zone, with monsters spawning after a fixed number of minutes after having been killed. So if no player is present and no monsters get killed, there are exactly as many monsters as spawn points. The more players start killing monsters, the more the number of monsters drops. In the extreme case, all monsters are dead, and whenever one spawns, it gets killed immediately. Obviously in that situation everybody perceives the other players as competition, as negative influence, in spite of nobody actively trying to disrupt the others game play. The situation is better in games like CoH which are relatively abundant in spawn points. But a better system would be more dynamic, spawning monsters faster when the population is low. Or instance the whole zone, creating a mirror image to effectively double the monster population, and easing the competition between players for the "rare resource" of monsters.

Instancing zones is definitely needed for games in which players can build houses. Houses and furniture are usually good money sinks for MMORPG economies, with people taking immense pride in having earned a big house and having spent a lot of effort to decorate it. But that only works if housing is available to everybody, and if players are able to show their achievements to others. Having less housing spots than players, like in UO, unfairly frustrates the late-comers, as housing spots don't respawn like monsters do. But the solution of Anarchy Online and Final Fantasy XI, where unlimited instanced appartments are available, all reached through the same door, is eliminating house sizes and exteriors. It would be better if that door would lead to an empty, flat area, where people could build their houses, and would be able to show off with their big castle they worked hard for. That flat area would have a certain size, and when there is no more room, the next flat area is created. That would still give the game unlimited amounts of space, but you could visit your friends castle, he just would need to tell you that it is in residential area number 17.

A MMORPG should encourage people to interact, to play together, to chat, to help each other. Instancing should never go so far as to create a large number of single-player games on the same server. But as the world is a virtual one, there is no need to limit resources strictly by number, making one players gain another players loss. Resources have to be limited, but they can be limited by how much effort it takes to achieve them, not by how many other players are competing with you for that resource. Players can easily accept that they can't get the sword of uberness, because they are too weak to slay the dragon that holds the sword. But if they know they could kill the dragon, they don't want to stand in a queue waiting for it to be their turn. And they don't want other players to interfere unless invited once they fight the dragon. The heroic act is being able to fight a dragon, not being the first one to log on after a server reset.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:05 PM Permanent Link