A further thought or three on server segregation and walled communities:
Why not offer legitimate private servers?
Also, tangentially, last time, Dblade noted (rightly, I think) that Role Playing servers are particularly susceptible to an influx of unwashed heathens. Would those who are really concerned about their little corner of the RP world be happier if they could just keep everyone out who didn’t have a club card? I mean, there are weirdos all over the place in these MMO things, you can never count on those other people doing things the right way. (Syp had me at “Sliders”. I loved that show’s early seasons…)
Of course, I must point out that with private servers, the sub model makes less sense once again. One may as well play with some mates over a LAN or just use someone’s spare desktop as a server. I’m sure many of those people already do so.
Would there be a market for legitimizing that segment of the player base? Or maybe, just maybe… sell the game like Guild Wars and let people play locally with friends (even solo… gasp!) without an internet tether to the mothership? Blizzard already subcontracts players as torrent bots for their download service, why not subcontract servers?
Sure, there will be layers of verification if someone plays “off the grid” and then wants to jack back into the matrix, but they could either just say “once on a private server, you stay there” or set up verification code in the private server sale package. (I know, I know, that’s not a trivial problem to solve… but hey, if you’re charging for the privilege of playing privately, there’s some money in the offering to pay for solving it, methinketh. I know we’ve blown the whole “cost-value” thing out of the water in MMOs, but still, using money to make the product itself better has a bit of history in commercial ventures.)
It is impractical, perhaps, for LOTRO or WoW to change that significantly… but might we see something like that in a future MMO? Really, if players are going to complain about those other players, the much-ballyhooed M for Massive in the acronym is already more like MIWFYQ rather than any sort of truly open, massively accessible world. (Maybe If We Feel You Qualify)
Maybe it should be My Multiplayer Online game.
It is a very interesting idea. With the many changes to subscription and payment models I would not rule it out. I would even call it a business opportunity. I would really wonder how many different worlds/servers/shards would establish.
My ideal idea is the one world, one shard approach. These are always instanced, EVE is just a very clever instanced galaxy, as it minimizes the downsides of instancing.
I just lamented about it today, a lot of people I would like to play some LOTRO are simply each on another shard. And is Blizzard not working a bit toward the one-world synergies by reducing server boundaries more and more in WoW?
Though this does not mean the “private server” approach would not work in such environments. I would call the private parts of the same world “premium instances”. 😉
That’s another tangent, then. Wizard 101 lets you hop servers almost whenever you’d like. There’s a one minute cooldown, but you can go wherever your friends are. It’s not quite “one world” (which definitely has advantages), but it’s close enough in practice for an individual player since they can jump around to different servers. The economy is segmented that way, but since the W101 economy is fairly constrained, it’s not a big deal.
If you are going to center the game around 100 person or less instances, like Champions Online or APB, this makes more sense. Make a unified social area, then a collection of free and private servers. Larger games would have too many population issues for this to work.
I think most games already offer enough self-segregation tools, but the roleplaying one is hard no matter what model you use. Maybe a private RP server by invite only or something.
“Maybe a private RP server by invite only or something.”
Exactly. It’s pretty much just like inviting friends over to play in your game room for tabletop RPG night; you don’t just let anyone in. This is just scaling the idea up a bit… with a few more people and connecting remotely to play a digital game.
You’re right that bigger games would be troublesome. That’s one reason why I liked to Chris F’s article where he notes that most of the WoW gameplay doesn’t really need more than 25 people concurrently. (40 previously with the bigger raids, of course, and ignoring guild size; this is just players actively playing together, not waiting to do so.)
Maybe you could even market it as a “guild server” or a “guild shard”… which almost sounds cool.
The big problem is cost. A WoW server isn’t just some desktop PC they throw the server on. Each “server” is probably a dozen or so expensive machines tied together to form the world. I doubt $300 would cover depreciation the first year, even if we ignore things like electricity, cabinet space in a data center, and more support personnel to watch over a lot more machines.
Your proposal to let people run their own server has a lot of added complexity, too. One problem is administrating a server requires a lot of hard work. The type of people who are willing to do this work for free are generally the type of people you don’t want running a server: the petty tyrants who think it’s funny to mess around with others just because they can. Not exactly the best way to “advertise” your game to people too cheap to pay for the full game.
In the end, there’s a lot of risk for only a little reward from my point of view. Hard to make a business case out of it, especially for a big game that’s still doing pretty well like WoW.
Brian, you know the tech better than I do by far. What if the private server were limited to, say, 50 or 100 players? You don’t need a rack of processors and hard drives for that, do you?
Also, it’s worth noting that there are already private servers out there… just illegitimate ones.
Ultimately, though, yes, I can’t see WoW going this way, but what if a different game were designed from it from day one? Perhaps even to the point where all you really do need is a desktop server?
I know I would love a return to the days of gamers running their own servers. Oldschool, like FPS games and NWN.
I disagree with Psychochild on this one, plenty of players have always shown that they’re quite capable at running private servers.
While it doesn’t make sense for WoW, I can’t see why someone couldn’t develop a world where smaller populations make sense. Most of the gameplay wouldn’t change, because in reality you rarely see more than 50-odd players at a time and usually quite less.
This hasn’t been the first time thinking about it I have to admit, it’s fairly close to a personal project (that would probably take way too long to get off the ground to bother with more than a mention).
I’ll answer the last question Tesh, a server of 50-150 players is reasonable in a RPG environment and would work quite well on a solitary server setup. Just one server, no cluster or anything else required.
My friends and I try and regularly have a LAN night every month, it’s gone a bit awry this year so far but if we could get a legitimate private server for WoW I can guarantee we’d use it every time we got together.
Tesh wrote:
What if the private server were limited to, say, 50 or 100 players? You don’t need a rack of processors and hard drives for that, do you?
You probably would, because that’s how the system was designed on a technical level. Using WoW as an example: if you restricted players to only being in a handful of adjacent zones and added area loading, then you might be able to get away with it. But, this would require a lot of engineering to pull it off. Again, it’s unlikely that this would result in a net profit for Blizzard.
Also, it’s worth noting that there are already private servers out there… just illegitimate ones.
Oh, I know. There were a handful of unauthorized M59 servers out there thanks to 3DO. I have a lot of experience dealing with this. Note that you’re talking about the developer giving an official blessing to these servers, which is a huge issue. If someone does something stupid on their own private server, most people are smart enough not to come bother you about it. But, if that private sever were sanctioned, then suddenly someone playing the bully with admin powers reflects poorly on your own game.
Rog wrote:
I disagree with Psychochild on this one, plenty of players have always shown that they’re quite capable at running private servers.
Really? I bet I can name a lot more instances where it hasn’t worked than you can name where it has. As I said, I had to deal with a lot of unauthorized M59 servers.
The problem is that in the short term, things are fine. Things will go smooth and everyone’s happy. Perhaps the admins will go out of their way to be nice to the players. But, eventually, they will want to abuse that power. The type of people who are interested in running their own server aren’t doing it for altruism. They’re going to start cheating for themselves or for their friends. They’re going to sell benefits to others.
That’s the main reason why I spent so much time shutting down the unauthorized servers, because it always seemed to be the case that people would abuse their power then it would sour people on M59. Sucks when someone’s possible first interaction with the game is some cheating asshole with the blessing of the server administrator.
This (allowing people to run private servers) almost happened for Ultima Online back in the day. Raph Koster wanted to release a stand-alone UO server and a suit of development tools that would allow people to setup their own shards, with a restricting of only allowing subscribing players to connect to those shards (via the official UO service).
It was shut down by executives before it got off the ground, though.
Anyway, as already mentioned there already are private servers for quite a lot of different MMOGs, and in this day and age it’s no problem for a decent computer with an alright connection to host a server for 500-1000 players (there are private UO servers up and running right now with 700+ players online, for instance, and some averaging 750ish online at any given time).
Also, Brian – the nice thing with private servers is that even if there are admins who bully the players or abuse their powers, there are other options for the players, and sooner rather than later those poor admins find their servers unpopular and empty as their players leave for greener pastures.
@Brain “Psychochild” Green:
I’m a lot more interested in the examples of player-run servers / services that are legitimate. IE: Most of the (now “traditional”) FPS market, as well as some select other examples like NWN.
To me, any failures are besides the point and no different than any other game that failed in one way or another. Implementation is IMHO independent from the theoretical model. In other words, if it’s done right, I believe it has a higher chance of success.
The issue of unauthorized private servers, ala most (now “traditional” again) MMORPGs, is that these are private servers with no support or structure provided by by the developers & publishers and in many cases are actively obstructed. Given those challenges, I would say the private servers have exceeded what most would expect of them. I’m not trying to add legitimacy to their efforts (legitimacy is an entirely separate debate IMHO), I’m just saying that they’ve managed to create software that technically works better than most people expect.
Take a good hard look at open source projects like MaNGOS for instance and then come back and tell me that 99% of WoW’s features are not reproducible in a smaller player-population environment.
The question of business model is what’s left and that’s a debate unto itself. I’d argue that the risks in traditional MMO subscription-or-F2P cluster-servers are higher due to the significant infrastructure required.
Selling software on its own already has a long history in the industry, so I always find it odd when those in the MMORPG market claim it’s unproven.
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[…] This works well for FPS games and should for MMOs as well.Tesh and I bandied about the thought of it way back in 2008 and he on his blog in 2010. […]