How many is enough?

MMO size is something that I believe is always left out of things. First off, you’ve got two very basic options at the start, single-‘server’ or multiple ‘servers’. I use ‘servers’ in quotes because in this day and age, you aren’t talking about real hardware, you’re talking about how the players are parceled out. Anyone who has given EVE a serious go has learned the upsides and downsides of single-server. However, EVE was not the first single-server MMO I had played. My first one was Anarchy Online, and technical hurdles aside (Let’s just say they had a bad launch), they had much the same separation of players as EVE has done. I wouldn’t be surprised if the EVE devs learned the strategy from AO.

AO was separated into rather decent size quadrants separated by zone lines, and each area had essentially a designated mission hub where people joined up at. Of course, there were cities with large amounts of people, however, chat was separated by level, meaning you could turn off level 1-20 chat if you were 30, or 20-50 chat if you were 70. Trade channels were designed this way as well, making sure that players were given ways to stay as separate as they’d like. I think this is key to actually fostering an environment, especially in a single-server. Single-server also is a better design for the new players, as they get readily accessible experience and economies.

So, single-server or Multi-server? Well, think about it honestly. If you indeed do single-server, the game world has to be large enough to pull it off. Single-server also removes any need for server transfer, mitigating costs down the road for the player base somewhat.

For a single-server to be in my design, the single-server becomes one single planet. Oddly, this is convenient and makes it even easier to control the environment. So, how to add in the separation brought about by servers in a single-server design? Well, you have to make communities, and sometimes the best solution really is the obvious one. Make a community. I’ll separate the barren surface into many communities. Say, ten total. Then, it’s time to give each community a look and feel. Here is where a lot of ‘race’ designs fall flat. In a game like World of Warcraft, Races are there to give a choice, but you do not choice a race based on ‘where’. The same can be said of EVE somewhat, Race is just starting space, which ultimately isn’t really useful in the grand scheme of things. I’d prefer race/society to be a choice that will actually funnel like-people together. So, that’s is what I’ll do here, with each community, or ‘Crew’.

Each ‘crew’ will be the remnants of the crew of each mining-colony ship that contained more than just miners looking for the fuel to repair interstellar travel, it would also contain the families, scientists, farmers, essentially everything to be sustainable in case things go south.

So far:
You are a colonist, your colony can not leave the planet, cannot call for help, and there is no space travel due to a universal (literally) fuel outage. Your technology is running out of its own fuel, and soon your society itself will be required to become self-sustaining. Your colony has been operating for 60 years without incident on a barren world we’ll call ZG-1287. It was never given a formal name to keep hope of leaving shortly alive. There are 10 colonies, each has developed its own sort of personality, ranging from gregarious to xenophobic and paranoid. The planet to date is a barren waste-land of sorts, with water only being found underground. There is a large distance between each colony making travel long and hazardous between them, making trade caravans their own communities as well.

Next, we’ll answer the original question with the new direction, How Many People?

About the author.

I’ve played video games since they basically existed in the PC format. I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the absolutely wretched that never even saw the light of day. Since my first round of playing Dark Castle and Elvira’s Castle, I’ve known I want to make these. I still do. And, I will.

Whenever I pontificate about upcoming features, a common reply to my words is ‘It would be great if they did that, but they won’t’. Well, I’m tired of ‘they’ not doing what should be done. When it comes to the future of MMO’s, I swear the computer game design world is wearing bifocals and I’ve got 20/20 vision. While I understand everyone has ‘ideas’ from time to time to ‘fix’ games, I’m sure no one has ideas this often and this innovative. I’ll be honest about my ego here, I sometimes feel I’m the Steve Jobs of MMO design, I know what people need and it’s not what they want.

I’ll be going over ideas, plans, possibilities, and balancing here, drilling down the points of an MMO you’ve probably thought of yourself, but even more that you haven’t thought of. So, if I have so many ideas, then one might ask why post them?

Plain and simple, someone might be able to pull one or two ideas off here, but without someone with real vision you’ll just implement a watered down version with none of the bite it needs. Of course, there’s also the shameless self-promotion plug, I will make these ideas a reality, but I’m not going to say no if some company wanted to hire me for this vision. I can guarantee you, no one can match what I can offer in the creativity field.

With that shameless self-plug over, back to the background. Yes, I’m a geek, nerd, whatever you’d like to call it. I don’t subscribe to TV, I prefer my entertainment to be interactive, not sitting and laughing/crying/answering questions at things on a non-interactive display. While I did dabble in consoles most my youth as most other geeks, I’ve grown almost entirely towards the PC, just because you can’t do a lot of things on consoles that you can do on PC’s. The only way that will change is if consoles become PC’s, which, let’s be honest, they are on their way there anyway.

My first MMO, which I fondly remember, is not even a graphic game. Dragonrealms, which I’ll often refer to as DR, was amazing, complex, and rich in content. Playing it on AOL, and then finally on the web, it had almost everything I wanted in a game. It’s actually still alive and well today, a subscription based mud that still has some players. Never heard of it or Simutronics, the company that makes it? Well, that same company also makes a little thing called the Hero Engine. I think we all know what current MMO uses Hero Engine. Hint, it’s star wars related.

Everquest was my first real graphic MMO. DR had thankfully taught me etiquette the proper way in an online game, as well as how to do complex classes. Ruins of Kunark was when I joined, and the class I played was a high elf enchanter. If you don’t know what that is, let me try to paint a picture of what that class was at that time. Pure crowd control. It was perhaps the only class that let groups take a lot more than one mob at a time, as well as the best at preventing a wipe. A pure utility class, soloing was rough but grouping quite easy. Everyone wanted you.

About halfway through Scars of Velious, I had returned to DR again to play with friends, but got enticed by my favorite genre, Science fiction made form in an MMO called Anarchy Online. Its story and ideas were quite good, and finally a game did instancing on a massive level with missions, not to mention random with rewards that you could ‘choose’. Again, I went utility, and chose an Engineer. My droid tanked so many things it was crazy, but in that same game I explored my love of crafting, even writing a guide and copyrighting it for said game. I explored using crafting as an experience source, even as a money source. So much was in this game, yet squandered so fast by bugs and what I believe bad direction. After a bit, there was another return to DR, and then onto another game which bad direction killed.

Yes my friends, I played Star Wars Galaxies at launch. Hands down, that resource gathering system still gave my crafting sides goosebumps I had only ever gotten in A Tale in the Desert. I don’t put that MMO in the list because I’ve never really played it long enough to count it, but it showed me what crafting could do, and SWG showed me what gathering could do. Alas, SWG didn’t keep me long, and lost me soon before the space expansion. Then, another return to DR, yet another return to EQ, and finally, the invite that changed a lot. My friend got me a beta invite into World of Warcraft Beta2.

WoW taught me a lot, and while they get a lot of stuff wrong, they do also get a lot right which I think they just don’t get credit for. While number of accounts is a number everyone throws around, I wonder how many vanilla’s are still around, or how many BC’s are still around. I’ve noticed somewhat of a natural progression in myself though in WoW. Yes, I rolled the hunter in vanilla. Leveled all the way to 60 in fairly good time, and then began gearing to raid. At that point on icecrown, though, the server raiding community essentially imploded after a big-guild sucked up most of the raid-ready 60’s and then collapsed, leaving a massive vacuum that forced a lot of people to desert the server. At this point, I had convinced friends to try the game, and moved with them to an RP server of all things (Three of them were heavy RPers).

There, I soloed, tried classes, grouped a bit, and found out very fast I have a completely different way of doing things. No one I have met has quested the same, leveled the same, not even approached their class the same. I thought I was just odd, or maybe my beta experience gave me an edge. Now I know that’s not the case, but that continued through BC. Toward the middle of BC, I joined a casual raiding guild, and began the quest into Karazhan. Here is where I think I really found out I was different. I consistently saw people being told what to do and how to do it, but, never me. I was even an oddly geared tank, going for avoidance over the then-king-mitigation. I pulled it off. Soon, I was an officer, which let me tell you, this is a scary thing to happen to someone who is more on the anti-social side. Now I know that I’m not antisocial, just asocial. Officer life was actually more fun for me, even with a guild-sundering and having to start a raid group from scratch, I continued to enjoy it, even becoming the raid lead. While we never made it too much past Zul’Aman’s third boss, we had fun. Then, enter Wrath.

In Wrath, my guild basically threw away raiding (being RP centered), and I floated over to a raiding guild I had done a few things with in BC. We were a 25-man guild, and I stuck it out all through Naxx and Ulduar. Ended up becoming an officer yet again, even a raid lead again, but soon after ulduar another shift in things and soon it was packing up and leaving for a new home. On my new server, I quickly found that starting my own guild just did not work.

Here is where I will say Blizzard does it wrong, guild creation, management, and advertising is wretched.

Soon after that failed attempt, I again sought out a raiding guild. Actually ended up being a decent one, got the third-server LK kill. However, even though I ended up being an officer, I had finally decided to go to the other faction after months of just no longer enjoying the current one. So, joined another guild, guild burned, reincarnated, burned, reincarnated again, and I find myself an officer and a raid lead yet again.

So, without further ado, let’s get to business here.