Designing a successful open world MMORPG with full loot and avoiding common pitfalls.

This article is written for Darkfall Now blog . I will be updating it few more times so make sure to bookmark it.

You are putting years of work and millions of dollars on the line, so I am sure you can go extra mile and read this wall of text :)  .  Warning: Please be patient with this because my English is not as developed as my Java :-)

Note: I don't have time to finish this article which I started years ago. I didn't pick up RoA or DND after the demise of Darkfall Unholy Wars. There are other pressing needs in life entertainment is taking back seat. I will publish this unfinished version which still has value for new game developers.

Incidentally Ub3rgames been developing Darkfall New Dawn and many of their ideas matches what I wrote 2 years ago! 

Why I decided to write this article?

A very exciting time is ahead of us, with so many MMO featuring open world, full loot, in a sandbox setting that are to be released from single person indie to large established studios. I have been playing this type of games for many years starting with UO and most recently playing Darkfall.  Here few thing game designer should consider for long term success.

Lets Jump right into it.

An informal discussion with dev (developer, game designer, director, anyone making the game). "Dev: This is my vision and a game I always wanted to create..." which is all good and dandy but it may not be a game many people wants to play.

"Dev: I don't care because I am not trying to create a game for everyone.  I am creating a game that people have been asking for a long time".  Often times game developer can't distinguish between vocal minorities and silent majority. These vocal minorities often distorts reality in social media and developer loses insight of their target audience.  As a result they end up developing a product that is not sustainable.  You already know that game development and maintenance is super expensive so while a satisfying a niche market is ideal, but at the end of the day game still needs appeal to a crowed of 50,000+ paying customers. 

"Dev: Basically it sounds like you are telling us to develop the next World of Warcraft (theme park) and not take any risk".  No!  The market for theme park MMO is saturated.  You are better off buying hotdog stands and get better ROI then writing another theme park MMO. 

"Dev: Why bother reinventing the wheel when we already seen the perfect model that we can just copy from EvE, UO, SWG?."  This is a very good point.  Philosophy and game design used in these games were perfect for the time these games served but they will not necessarily work in current time. UO and SWG were pioneered and had very little competition.  Technology changed (broadband Internet, 3D graphics, etc), player expectation greatly shifted, and player are now exposed to a much wider range of Sandbox games (100 already in the market).  EvE Online is still going strong simply because over the years CCP kept up with the changing market and constantly evolving their game and business model to stay ahead of time.   (click read more)

Target market audience:

Gaming population is aging fast. First Atari 2600 came out in 1977!  Here is a graph CCP released showing age distribution for EVE Online players.




I believe it is best and safest to develop a game targeting 30 ~ 45 years old age range.  This is your ideally target market because these players are mostly employed and have enormous amount of disposable income.  These gamers are also financially stable, doesn't hop around too many games as they are looking to stick to a game for a long term.

This perfectly blends with the concepts of sandbox open world game that focus on "char progression", "persistent world and assets", "community driven". 

Fallacy of only player's "twitch" skill should determine all outcome.

Many upcoming products are advertised as "Only your skill will determine the outcome of your success".   While this may sound good on paper, in reality players skills in video game  are highly dependent on many factors beyond players control . Games are impacted by Ping, Hardware, in-game activity, etc.  By no means "skill" is a fair system by the very nature of online games.  Skill is also highly dependent on how much real life time a player may commit hone their game skill, thus it puts lesser committed players into severe disadvantage.

In a player driven full loot game when "high" skill aka "elite" players are constantly rewarded for "wining" fights, there are huge negative consequences in the game ecosystem. Average/Low skills  players are farming gears/resources and these resources are take away by elite players who only makes up 10% of the game population.  Average players don't feel rewarded for playing the game, because they feel like they are "donating gears" constantly and getting nothing in return.

Elite players will make the argument that average players can simply "learn 2 play" and put the time to "get better".  Often they will accuse average player of being lazy, not willing to learn or take risk.  Average players are faced with few choices.  Either increase their time commitment to the game and "get better" to be on equal footing  or get out of this rat race and find some other game. Given player statistics, we know for a fact that sooner or later average players will stops participating in the game events and overall activity will decline.  This is detrimental in a open world sandbox MMORPG where player activity IS the content. This creates a snowballing effect where low activity makes game less fun to those who play thus they also quit. 

Sadly I have even seen elite players going as far as calling out players to leave the game because in their view 'avg players don't bring anything to the game.'.  Sadly these elite players are not paying your bills of running the game. 

I am not suggesting you simply remove the need for skill from your game design, but it should be just one of the many thing that will reward players for playing the game.  This section is needed to justify certain design system I am recommending below.

Game Design Principals (The Obvious)

• Anything and everything you add or change think how player might exploit it.
• Think of ways player may be macro/bot(ing) so design mechanics that are bot proof.
• Give players reason to log regularly even if it is for few min.
• "Talking" NPC, Roaming mobs are the cheapest way to make the game feel alive.
• Never have any single event/quest/activity that gives out more than one type of reward.  Otherwise it will undermine other activities and reduce dependency. 
• Game design should encourage trading and exploration.
• Keep the game unpredictable to degree by putting random events (disaster) or boss spawn.
• Automate as much as possible and don't rely on GM (Game Master) because human hours are expensive.

Alignment system

"Why do we need an artificial system in a game that promises total freedom?". 

Simple Answer: Human nature!

Player who Griefs
There will always be few individual in every game whose solo purpose is "to make as many people quit the game possible". 

Players who are "Sheep"
While they love PvP they also want to choose non PvP time.

Players who are big bad "Wolves"
While killing anything and everything that moves is an amazing feeling, most wolves don't want to go on a killing spree if that will result in people quiting the game.

Player who are "Role Players"
All actions should have consequence and meaning.  It should never be PvP for the sake of PvP.

When you are hit with bandwidth, budget shortfall, deadlines, most studio will shelf alignment system first.  Alignment system is the most important requirement in any full loot pvp game where .01% of the player base can easily make a large number of players quit.  This eventually hits social media and goes viral and the product you work so hard is blemished by terrible reviews from a bunch of pissed of customers.

Finally an alignment system without meaningful punishment is an alignment system that serves no purpose.

FYI I have suggested flag based  alignment system for Darkfall.

Game content

In previous sections I made the case about why every player needs to feel rewarded in any game. While mega events with super rewards (loots) will keep top players happy, the game still need to introduce many low profile activities so that those who can't participate or compete at highest level still have things they can do.  Don't design all your activities targeting top players or any one play style.  

PvE

Open world / sandbox games relies on player to create content.  While player generated content are ideal, they are not dependable.  There will be times through out the year your game population will fluctuate and it will proportionally impact on player generated content.   PvE is a very good way to set baseline content and keep player base satisfied / occupied.

My experience is that vast majority of the players in full loot open world games are player who likes and needs PvE.  Building high quality AI and challenging mobs will go long way to keep many players entertained for a long period of time.  It increases replay value of your game. Therefore your PvE has to be more sophisticated then simply killing 1000 rats with 1 million HP each. 

The world must scale

Historically every MMO looses 50% of the players within first 30 days. Regardless of how good your product will turn out, it is best to plan for huge swing after release.

This means you can't simply design a static world that will have exactly 1000 cities, 200 ships yards, 500 markets, and 3000 mob spawns. You may design the world for 20,000 simultaneous players, but few month down the road that number could be 5000.  The decline (or even increase) in population will impact the game play and the game economy which will be a big factor determining player satisfaction. 

By design every functional building, NPC, mob spawns, and object must be connected directly to players activity and game population.  Another words when player activity and population drops so should the number of available mobs, cities, etc.  This will prevent the game from become over trivial when population drops.  This will prevent players from flooding the game economy.  The map needs to contract when players are not active in certain areas.   For example here is a cool AI being developed by Mortal Online developers where NPC can occupy and build on empty land and take over.

Just recently Elite: Dangerous has been released that will support 400 billion star system.  While the sheer size is amazing,  players are already complain about empty universe and "can't find anyone".

Resource sinks are staple for good economy

Sink refers to items that are completed moved out of the game economy.  For example when player deletes an item, or item is destroyed or consumed by usage.

Faucet refers to items that are added to the game usually in form of rewards for doing certain task like harvesting, or completing a quest etc.

When a game doesn't balance faucet and sink it creates unstable economy and causes hyper inflation. This impact all players particularly new players who joins the game late.  For example when game is released 1 iron ore cost 100 gold.  But 12 months later the cost increased to 1000 gold.  This means if player is saving gold they lost purchasing power due to inflation.    

Best way to design sinks are creating items that are consumed on usage.  These items don't change hand and are automatically consumes by the system as player uses them.

The other thing to consider is making martials need for crafting dynamic.  Anything purchased from vendor should also be dynamic.  This dynamic calculation should be based on amount of materials "circulating/generated" in the economy over a period of time.  While all this means a lot of extra coding, it will pay off by keep economy stable and keeping values of materials constant.

When sink is missing loot/resource keeps circulating from players to players and over time it devalues loot.  This in turn devalues farming and any activities that gives out rewards.  It is extremely important early on to have durability loss on all armor, weapon, equipment on use. 

Also in full loot game wealth is mostly accumulated by top 10% of the PvPer.  It becomes too easy to be sustainable just by PvP for this group.  This same 10% ends up participating on all server events and activates.  The other 90% of the population eventually grow tiered of fighting the same crowd and other interference from the 10%.  Eventually even these top PvPer get bored with the game because of "full banks" syndrome.  Therefore sink needs to implemented to prevent this scenario we see in full loot game.  This can be implement in many forms like having "banking/storage" expense, having decay over time, having a expiration date on certain resources or items.

Again developer needs to implement monitors so that durability loss, expiration of items, decay, and storage expense all scales based on state of the game. 

The Ugly Side of MMO. Hacks, Dupe, Exploitation

Be prepared from the get go!  No matter how well designed you design your game, it will have to constantly fight to survive from exploiters.  

Dupe is the most devastating of all exploitation.  This destroys game economy, your loose credibility and people who feel cheated out will leave. Treat your game just like a enterprise banking application.  Use proper SQL Isolation Level, have complete auditing trails. Every single item in the game should have a full history that tracks not only its creation and how many time it changed hands but also when it transforms (combined) in crafting process the master items needs to be tracked. The auditing system will only be called success if it can be used to clean up dupes and prevent "roll backs".

Developer needs to get well versed into how Aim Bot, ESP, lag switching, geometry exploitation works so that you can design your game around them. You also need to develop certain hooks and automated monitoring to catch possible exploitations. 

Trial System

We are no longer in 90s where players are limited by a handful of MMORPGs.  Just getting the word out is hard enough.  Your first and foremost goal should be to have large number of players play your game.  There is no reason to put any artificial pay gate.  Many players these are very skeptical about Indie devs.  Your aim should be to convert them to paying customer either via a cash shop, or buying full unlock game, or offer subscription service.  In a player driven sandbox game, your population is your biggest assets either they are paying or not.  If you are developing quality product people will convert from free customer to a paying customer.  

Farmers and Gold Sellers

Success of your game will no doubt attract unwanted gold sellers and spammers.  
Do everything possible to make it harder to bot farming.  All activity in the game should require user interaction to discourage farmers.