We Can Fix That with Data

No matter how popular a game may be, someday, nobody will play it. Someday, World of Warcraft will need to consolidate its servers. In other cases, the game is never popular in the first place. More than one MMO company has been disappointed in a new title’s sales and subscriber counts. Long before launch, design needs to account for both ends of the spectrum.

Lord of the Rings Online just announced a system where players can play monsters, one of those ideas that’s been kicking around MMOs forever. It’s neat to see somebody finally try it. One part of the announcement gives me pause, though:

Players, on the other hand, will have optional series of quests that will pit them against monster players, giving them reasons to go out and mix it up. PvMP is optional and consensual – you won’t “stumble across” a monster player. PvMP will be allowed in specially delineated areas of the game.

What happens if nobody shows up? What happens if the game is massively popular? What happens five or ten years from now, when the game’s population naturally and inevitably declines? Will there be enough players who want to be monsters to populate those quests?

I don’t mean to pick on Turbine all day, but a great example of a cool system that failed because it didn’t scale well was the crafting stations in Asheron’s Call 2. To craft most items, you needed to stand next to a crafting station — if you wanted to blacksmith, you had to stand next to a forge, etc. By virtue of standing next to a forge, your crafting skill would get a little buff. You could put resources into the station (ingots into the forge, etc.) to increase the buff, but the resource cost was so high, it ensured that a number of players would have to band together and donate. It encourages crafters to work together, to make friends, and to congregate.

I thought it was a very cool system, but it relied on a certain density of crafters. If you’re the only one at the station, you’re not going to waste your resources on it, because you can’t possibly afford the cost. If I remember correctly from beta, it took five or ten players to fill up a station.

In live, sadly, I never saw that many players around any single crafting station, and the system went unused. AC2 was shut down in December of last year.