Maybe not suggestion in traditional sense but I thought this text is worthwile to read for you as a developer of this MMO. Some Mistakes seem to be universal and can be applied to every game that tries to simulate a persistent online world. The text is from Raph Koster, lead designer of ultima online and he formulated several "laws" game designer need to be look out for. Some are probably not applicable to starbase most of them are.
These are taken from both experience and from the writings of others. Most are the sort of “Duh” things that many who have done this sort of game design take for granted, but others may be less intuitive. Many of the laws here were actually stated as such by others, and not by me.
A Caveat
Ola’s Law About Laws
Any general law about virtual worlds should be read as a challenge rather than as a guideline. You’ll learn more from attacking it than from accepting it.
Design Rules
The secrets to a really long-lived, goal-oriented, online game of wide appeal
Modes of expression
You’re trying to provide as many modes of expression as possible in your online world. Character classes are just modes of expression, after all.
Persistence means it never goes away
Once you open your online world, expect to keep your team on it indefinitely. Some of these games have never closed. And closing one prematurely may result in losing the faith of your customers, damaging the prospects for other games in the same genre.
Macroing, botting, and automation
No matter what you do, someone is going to automate the process of playing your world.
Corollary:
Looking at what parts of your game players tend to automate is a good way to determine which parts of the game are tedious and/or not fun.
Game systems
No matter what you do, players will decode every formula, statictic, and algorithm in your world via experimentation.
It is always more rewarding to kill other players than to kill whatever the game sets up as a target.
A given player of level x can slay multiple creatures of level y. Therefore, killing a player of level x yields ny reward in purely in-game reward terms. Players will therefore always be more rewarding in game terms than monsters of comparable difficulty. However, there’s also the fact that players will be more challenging and exciting to fight than monsters no matter what you do.
Never trust the client.
Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the enemy. Never ever ever forget this.
J. C. Lawrence’s “do it everywhere” law
If you do it one place, you have to do it everywhere. Players like clever things and will search them out. Once they find a clever thing they will search for other similar or related clever things that seem to be implied by what they found and will get pissed off if they don’t find them.
Hyrup’s “do it everywhere” Corollary
The more detailed you make the world, the more players will want to break away from the classical molds.
Dr Cat’s Stamp Collecting Dilemma
“Lots of people might like stamp collecting in your virtual world. But those who do will never play with those who like other features. Should you have stamp collecting in your world?” We know that there are a wide range of features that people find enjoyable in online worlds. We also know that some of these features are in conflict with one another. Given the above, we don’t yet know if it is possible to have a successful world that incorporates all the features, or whether the design must choose to exclude some of them in order to keep the players happy.
Koster’s Law (Mike Sellers was actually the one to dub it thus)
The quality of roleplaying is inversely proportional to the number of people playing.
Hyrup’s Counter-observation
The higher the fee, the better the roleplayers. (And of course, the smaller the playerbase.)
Enforcing roleplaying
A roleplay-mandated world is essentially going to have to be a fascist state. Whether or not this accords with your goals in making such a world is a decision you yourself will have to make.
Storytelling versus simulation
If you write a static story (or indeed include any static element) in your game, everyone in the world will know how it ends in a matter of days. Mathematically, it is not possible for a design team to create stories fast enough to supply everyone playing. This is the traditional approach to this sort of game nonetheless. You can try a sim-style game which doesn’t supply stories but instead supplies freedom to make them. This is a lot harder and arguably has never been done successfully.
Players have higher expectations of the virtual world
The expectations are higher than of similar actions in the real world. For example: players will expect all labor to result in profit; they will expect life to be fair; they will expect to be protected from aggression before the fact, and not just to seek redress after the fact; they will expect problems to be resolved quickly; they will expect that their integrity will be assumed to be beyond reproach; in other words, they will expect too much, and you will not be able to supply it all. The trick is to manage the expectations.
Online game economies are hard
A faucet->drain economy is one where you spawn new stuff, let it pool in the “sink” that is the game, and then have a concomitant drain. Players will hate having this drain, but if you do not enforce ongoing expenditures, you will have Monty Haul syndrome, infinite accumulation of wealth, overall rise in the “standard of living” and capabilities of the average player, and thus unbalance in the game design and poor game longevity.
Ownership is key
You have to give players a sense of ownership in the game. This is what will make them stay–it is a “barrier to departure.” Social bonds are not enough, because good social bonds extend outside the game. Instead, it is context. If they can build their own buildings, build a character, own possessions, hold down a job, feel a sense of responsibility to something that cannot be removed from the game–then you have ownership.
If your game is narrow, it will fail
Your game design must be expansive. Even the coolest game mechanic becomes tiresome after a time. You have to supply alternate ways of playing, or alternate ways of experiencing the world. Otherwise, the players will go to another world where they can have new experiences. This means new additions, or better yet, completely different subgames embedded in the actual game.
Lambert’s Laws:
Featuritis
No matter how many new features you have or add, the players will always want more.
Pleasing your Players
Despite your best intentions, any change will be looked upon as a bad change to a large percentage of your players. Even those who forgot they asked for it to begin with.
Hyrup’s Loophole Law
If something can be abused, it will be.
Murphy’s Law
Servers only crash and don’t restart when you go out of town.
Dr Cat’s Theorem
Attention is the currency of the future.
Dr Cat’s Theorem as expressed by J C Lawrence
The basic medium of multiplayer games is communication.
These are taken from both experience and from the writings of others. Most are the sort of “Duh” things that many who have done this sort of game design take for granted, but others may be less intuitive. Many of the laws here were actually stated as such by others, and not by me.
A Caveat
Ola’s Law About Laws
Any general law about virtual worlds should be read as a challenge rather than as a guideline. You’ll learn more from attacking it than from accepting it.
Design Rules
The secrets to a really long-lived, goal-oriented, online game of wide appeal
- have multiple paths of advancement (individual features are nice, but making them ladders is better)
- make it easy to switch between paths of advancementt (ideally, without having to start over)
- make sure the milestones in the path of advancement are clear and visible and significant (having 600 meaningless milestones doesn’t help)
- ideally, make your game not have a sense of running out of significant milestones (try to make your ladder not feel finite)
Modes of expression
You’re trying to provide as many modes of expression as possible in your online world. Character classes are just modes of expression, after all.
Persistence means it never goes away
Once you open your online world, expect to keep your team on it indefinitely. Some of these games have never closed. And closing one prematurely may result in losing the faith of your customers, damaging the prospects for other games in the same genre.
Macroing, botting, and automation
No matter what you do, someone is going to automate the process of playing your world.
Corollary:
Looking at what parts of your game players tend to automate is a good way to determine which parts of the game are tedious and/or not fun.
Game systems
No matter what you do, players will decode every formula, statictic, and algorithm in your world via experimentation.
It is always more rewarding to kill other players than to kill whatever the game sets up as a target.
A given player of level x can slay multiple creatures of level y. Therefore, killing a player of level x yields ny reward in purely in-game reward terms. Players will therefore always be more rewarding in game terms than monsters of comparable difficulty. However, there’s also the fact that players will be more challenging and exciting to fight than monsters no matter what you do.
Never trust the client.
Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the enemy. Never ever ever forget this.
J. C. Lawrence’s “do it everywhere” law
If you do it one place, you have to do it everywhere. Players like clever things and will search them out. Once they find a clever thing they will search for other similar or related clever things that seem to be implied by what they found and will get pissed off if they don’t find them.
Hyrup’s “do it everywhere” Corollary
The more detailed you make the world, the more players will want to break away from the classical molds.
Dr Cat’s Stamp Collecting Dilemma
“Lots of people might like stamp collecting in your virtual world. But those who do will never play with those who like other features. Should you have stamp collecting in your world?” We know that there are a wide range of features that people find enjoyable in online worlds. We also know that some of these features are in conflict with one another. Given the above, we don’t yet know if it is possible to have a successful world that incorporates all the features, or whether the design must choose to exclude some of them in order to keep the players happy.
Koster’s Law (Mike Sellers was actually the one to dub it thus)
The quality of roleplaying is inversely proportional to the number of people playing.
Hyrup’s Counter-observation
The higher the fee, the better the roleplayers. (And of course, the smaller the playerbase.)
Enforcing roleplaying
A roleplay-mandated world is essentially going to have to be a fascist state. Whether or not this accords with your goals in making such a world is a decision you yourself will have to make.
Storytelling versus simulation
If you write a static story (or indeed include any static element) in your game, everyone in the world will know how it ends in a matter of days. Mathematically, it is not possible for a design team to create stories fast enough to supply everyone playing. This is the traditional approach to this sort of game nonetheless. You can try a sim-style game which doesn’t supply stories but instead supplies freedom to make them. This is a lot harder and arguably has never been done successfully.
Players have higher expectations of the virtual world
The expectations are higher than of similar actions in the real world. For example: players will expect all labor to result in profit; they will expect life to be fair; they will expect to be protected from aggression before the fact, and not just to seek redress after the fact; they will expect problems to be resolved quickly; they will expect that their integrity will be assumed to be beyond reproach; in other words, they will expect too much, and you will not be able to supply it all. The trick is to manage the expectations.
Online game economies are hard
A faucet->drain economy is one where you spawn new stuff, let it pool in the “sink” that is the game, and then have a concomitant drain. Players will hate having this drain, but if you do not enforce ongoing expenditures, you will have Monty Haul syndrome, infinite accumulation of wealth, overall rise in the “standard of living” and capabilities of the average player, and thus unbalance in the game design and poor game longevity.
Ownership is key
You have to give players a sense of ownership in the game. This is what will make them stay–it is a “barrier to departure.” Social bonds are not enough, because good social bonds extend outside the game. Instead, it is context. If they can build their own buildings, build a character, own possessions, hold down a job, feel a sense of responsibility to something that cannot be removed from the game–then you have ownership.
If your game is narrow, it will fail
Your game design must be expansive. Even the coolest game mechanic becomes tiresome after a time. You have to supply alternate ways of playing, or alternate ways of experiencing the world. Otherwise, the players will go to another world where they can have new experiences. This means new additions, or better yet, completely different subgames embedded in the actual game.
Lambert’s Laws:
- As a virtual world’s “realism” increases, the pool of possible character actions increase.
- The opportunities for exploitation and subversion are directly proportional to the pool size of possible character actions.
- A bored player is a potential and willing subversive.
- Players will eventually find the shortest path to the cheese.
Featuritis
No matter how many new features you have or add, the players will always want more.
Pleasing your Players
Despite your best intentions, any change will be looked upon as a bad change to a large percentage of your players. Even those who forgot they asked for it to begin with.
Hyrup’s Loophole Law
If something can be abused, it will be.
Murphy’s Law
Servers only crash and don’t restart when you go out of town.
Dr Cat’s Theorem
Attention is the currency of the future.
Dr Cat’s Theorem as expressed by J C Lawrence
The basic medium of multiplayer games is communication.
