Regulation – MMO Fallout

I love sandbox MMOs and nothing gives me a better feeling than having a good discussion around what the genre needs to evolve. In the past, I’ve used this website to discuss my discontent with the fact that sandbox MMOs could be so much more but often devolve into random death matches with extensive crafting systems implanted. A lot of this stems from the freedom and punishment system, what the developers allow players to do and what players can expect to be “punished” for doing. For the sake of this conversation, I am not referring to bug abuse or exploits, but intentional systems that are purposefully planted to create gameplay.

Here at MMO Fallout, I adhere to the basic process that the community reflects the game, it isn’t a coincidence. So if you have a game where resources can be drained permanently (Wurm Online), you will have players dedicated to draining those resources if only to ensure that no one else can have them. If your game centers around player vs player combat, than you will form a community of gankers and player killers. And, of course, if you create a world that is completely safe you will end up with high-end characters who may have never figured out basic features.

By implementing features in a game and then telling players that they are expected to not engage in such activity, the activity itself simply becomes more appealing to a wider base. Ren and Stimpy fans will know this as the big red button effect.

That being said, sandbox MMOs are all about having a certain level of freedom above and beyond other games, and that level of freedom opens the door for people to act like jerks. Let’s go back to the resource drain conversation: Say you wanted it to be possible for players to deforest an area in order to construct buildings in the new fields. How do you stop a clan of people from griefing and deforesting large portions of the map for little more than “giggles?” The answer I get from developers is “we let the community police itself.”

I can’t say this enough: The community doesn’t police itself. No one is going to stop Tom over there from deforesting the neighborhood, and odds are no one will come to the defense when Tom heads over to the newbie zone in full top-level gear and starts a genocide of new players. I’ve played far too many free for all sandbox MMOs to know that this community policing never happens. In Eve Online, players have a measure of built-in defense in the form of high security space with NPC guards. For MMOs like Mortal Online, you are either in 10.0 (highest security) or 0.0 (lowest), there is no middle ground.

There are many ways to deal with our lumberjack Tom. A system of fatigue can make it prohibitive for a small group to deforest an area. Allowing players to take ownership of land and situate NPC guards to keep out specific players known to grief, having only certain trees able to be uprooted, or making the replanting of trees just as easy as the destruction. This goes back to the original problem, however, of requiring a developer willing to implement systems more complicated than solving all of your problems by stabbing them.

Some MMOs solve this with automated prison systems: Become a notorious criminal and you will eventually be caught and thrown in jail, where you will be forced to do menial repetitive tasks in order to be released. Just recently I talked about the plan in Dominus to allow players to put bounties on gankers, going as far as allowing the player to keep reissuing the bounty as long as he can afford to pay for it, and selectively choosing who is allowed to take on the bounty.

Preventing lumberjack Tom from deforesting an area with his cohort of griefers is a much more difficult task than punishing someone for killing too many newbies, and I’ll admit that my ideas presented above may not be reasonable when experimented in an actual sandbox MMO. But if a developer wants to put in a system by which players can theoretically drive a species to extinction, or deforest a zone, or deplete an area’s resources, they need to have some sort of system in place to compensate for when such an event occurs, because it will happen without a doubt and when players feel that they are unable to do anything about griefing, the number of players griefing will increase and the grieved will simply quit.

And I don’t want to imply that our Tom character is always a jerk, or a bad person. MMOs by nature attract players who strive to do the impossible, often for no reason other than to say that they were able to do it. Everquest created a dragon that could not be killed, players worked tirelessly to try and kill it. World of Warcraft placed its bosses in open world environments, players managed to rope them into major cities.

There is a middle ground between freedom and regulation that sandbox MMOs need in order to survive, which is why more structured titles like Eve Online have gathered more than 350,000 subscribers and on the opposite end we have games like Mortal Online and its inability to profit, and Earthrise bankrupting its developer.

I would love to see Eve Online’s structure translated to a fantasy-themed MMO.