Are We A MMO?

@Bowen Bloodgood

Beleive it or not I am a very powerful empath, and I think that most of the dev team is scared to have a live staff... everytime we hinted in that direction I heard "DRAMA ALERT" in the heads of the devs

The thing I have the most trouble to digest is that we've had what 15 years to find solutions since UO ?

Why are we rejecting an idea because in the past when we had no experience things turned sour ?

In fact I could go on and say that the biggest source of drama was RMT... But of course they bring alot of funding with them... so we turn the blind eye ?

 

I don't remember too much about UO's counselor program. But what I mean is more like live DMs. Not necessarily folks who focus on in-game help requests.. but one or 3 people who run story and events (and hopefully get paid for it). It's a role I certainly wouldn't mind getting in on. (@Lord British @DarkStarr *cough cough*) Just saying. Perhaps harass the occasional farmer in the monkey room. You can never be sure of what's going to happen with a good DM floating around.. And it's great fun for the players too.

 

You are too kind, may I remind you that I was an apprentice seer on atlantic, and that is exactly what game masters were supposed to do, thing is bugs that needed immediate attention popped all over the place

The orchestration of the UO story was phenomenal, each server had their team and implementation, GMs led seers that led counselors who all worked so that people would beleive in a dynamic story. It was pure genius.

But we all know its much more complex than that, you need vision yes, coherence yes, but the culprit is often the execution

Some of the GMs were quite young and devs (all over) have kind of became wary of leading such teams because many didn't respect their promises and or tried to steal money from them by selling items on e-bay and literally taking the power from the hands of the artists. *cough cough*

You see... right ?

You know what, if portalarium ever offers me a job Bowen, I'd gladly give it to you, I think you should go first

I think portalarium should have hired you a long time ago, but if it was me I'd make you work on something else than live animation

Life is good... keep on keeping on.

bahaha

 

Part of the issue as I see it, was the fact that the seer & counselor program consisted of volunteers. Which is going to be a hard group to assert any kind of control over. The fact that there were so many shards is another challenge. You'd need a separate team dedicated to each server which is of course, what they did as I understand it. I didn't pay much attention to it though and all I ever saw of seers what answering in-game tickets or showing up for the odd event.

Just from the player perspective I think it was too much and I'm sure there was a lot of behind the scenes stuff going on and personally, with EA's fingerprints it doesn't surprise me that there was drama.

I wouldn't do volunteers for that kind of thing. Not for events and story and not for SotA which only has the one world. All it takes is for 1 person not to show up for the job one day to really mess things up. The same can be said of players if a story element is heavily dependent upon them. It's hard enough keeping volunteer GM/DMs active in a relatively small world setting.

Where UO doesn't seem like it had the luxury of a small team who could do this task, I think SotA with it's single world probably could do it with reasonable success with 6 people or less provided they stayed focused.

 

I have always looked at the story as more of a solo thing. The dynamic content, the part that rolls out between episodes, is the story for multiplayer.

But, I am sure I will have to willfully suspend disbelief from time to time when it comes to the solo story.

 

Which still is a part I don't understand. Why is it called a single-player story or single-player narrative? How is the story playing out differently from other themepark MMOs that tell a story and have quests?

 

I did not start playing SotA until release 12 and I did not play enough to really understand everything going on. If I can remember, early on the philosphy of if it was an MMO or a single player game with multiplayer options was a balance. On top of that was what Richard wanted and the players wanted for SotA. I believe the terms used was some wanted UO and some wanted the Ultima series. What sticks out in my head in 2014 was a YouTube video of game play and in the next video, it sounded like the YouTuber had been contacted by Port and was told to say it was not an MMO. I still lean to the understanding that SotA did not start off an MMO, perhaps as money and tech comes in, we can tackle it and as such, are now on the MMO side of things.

This happened with Star Citizen. Some backers wanted Wing Commander, some wanted a Wing Commander MMO. However, with Star Citizen they were able to make the Persistent Universe to create an MMO and sale the single player game separate and then tie the two together with tech and a continuing-ish story. I use past tense, but Star Citizen is not a complete game yet. It strikes me that SotA is trying to branch out and tackle doing both the MMO and Single Player Story together versus splitting them. In any event, it looks like we can call ourselves an Sandbox MMO.

 

Lol does it really matter? Sota is Sota with pluses and minuses as with any game. Right now whatever Sota is, it is incomplete. I say lets' work on that.

 

That is the hard part... it isn't yet, but portalarium has expressed the wish to be innovative, and well right now, we're pushing them to be really innovative. As I've told you before I have been privy to all the effort King British made to refill a whole new world with lore as he did for the ultimas. It's a collosal effort if you think that he had all those years to build the ultima cannon. I am a student in myth legend in mystery since I can remember and my jaw was hitting the floor during all my visits.

In the best of worlds Lum could have done the job (I really beleive in Lum, he's a hero for me) but then bugs started showing up and well now we need a quest designer too, and I beleive we will need a few more people to reach the single player story with consequences.

As I've explained there was a change in priority, but you can rest assured the team KNOWS the problem and are working hard to catch up.

 

You are right, apprentice seers and counselors were volounteers, but the elder seers and GMs who led the story weren't.

Of course the details you seem to not want to face is that it wasn't the problem, AT ALL. Some servers had really passionate teams that really worked hard for it to work (I've seen atlantic and pacific team), sadly a few bad apples within the hired GM team also started to corrupt the volunteers, and when they were threatened to lose their job, they asked two volunteers to sue EA because they should get paid according to some shady law.

I've had to work my contacts alot to find the real truth, it was all setup just to take revenge on EA.

It's not only in game drama which they had to deal with... hence the reticence of most devs nowadays and the thou shall not lawyer me bro.

I beleive your estimate is about right, I also think it is possible and MUCH easier than with UO, 6 people should indeed be enough.

It's just that Portalarium isn't freely willing to "try again" without some innovative concepts that would make it fun for everyone.

I understand them... the job is already overwhelming as it is :/

 

You are partialy right, during the kickstarter campaign, they told this :

"Will this be a MMO ? Will I be able to play with my friends ?

Yes, you will be able to play with your friends! Multiplayer games encourage social bonds that go far beyond what can be accomplished in a solo player game. I remember the depth of these bonds in players who met in-game only to get married in real life, how people who died in the real world were deeply mourned and celebrated by their online friends whom they may never have met face to face. Though Shroud of the Avatar won’t be a massively multiplayer online role playing game, it will be a multiplayer game. We will be describing this in more detail in our upcoming community blogs."

Source

So, yes, SotA was not intended to be a "Massively" multiplayer game. And by the way, it's not really a MMO as long as you can chose to play solo/friend only (even if it's advertised as such more clearly now). Besides that, all of your message about single player/coop is only your personal perception and extrapolations. They never told that those modes will get all the attention. They advertised the game as a selective MULTIPLAYER game by the way. And yes, they promised a deep story line, which has to be working in solo, coop AND multiplayer modes.

 

It can be done solo. There doesnt seem to be bosses involved. Its completeable offline where the economy and combat will work differently. Its a multi-leg story the you can do each part whenever you want without having to complete another part first

 

The only logical way I can see things fitting together is Episode quest = single, release updated content = MMO.

Anything that is patched in each release would be part of the on going evolution of content couldn't be expected to be part of the single player narrative.

 

I suppose I've just seen too many volunteer organizations in my time and as a DM from a Neverwinter Nights server having seen how people directly involved come and go on a whim I may be a bit biased. I mean no offense to any former seers or counselors. I simply have no idea what happened behind the scenes. I can only imagine volunteers + EA not being a good mix. But then EA never seems to mix well with anything.

Unfortunately, the larger the barrel the more bad apples there are likely to be. Metaphorically speaking of course, Portalarium's hardly a bucket by comparison and I'll take them over EA any time.

 

The sentences "create a story-driven soloplayer experience that has the ability to play online" and "story-driven basically soloplayer experience" implies that the soloplayer part was meant to be the focus.

It is like someone announcing a "basically racing game with the ability to play soccer". Then the game is presented as a soccer game in which you can drive home with your car. Racing fans would not be amused by this.

 

No, sorry.

If I cook a burger, I cook a burger, not bread OR meat. Portalarium is actualy working on both parts.

 

Yet if you say it is basically a quarterpounder but in the end you deliver just a very a tiny piece of meat then the customers might not be happy about that.

 

We can't get more than 50 people in a scene without causing massive performance issues for above average machines. So I would say that "massively" shouldn't be a part of it. In addition, the way the server architecture relies on a player to be the "Master" of a zone means this issue will always be a part of SotA. The "Master" will always be the performance bottleneck in zones with lots of players. Master isn't chosen smartly, either. It is just the first person who joins the zone, and that could be someone playing on a toaster (with at least 8GB of RAM of course) in Antarctica.

 

Sure, but no one is able to predict the final size of the game as for now.

 

And how, pray tell, do single-player games tell stories differently from MMOs? A buttload of cutscenes? Please.

You really think Skyrim is structured any differently than ESO from a story perspective? How about Ultima 4? Oh wait, it's a game about grinding reputation. Witcher and Mass Effect? Cutscenes...

A game tells you about how you're the hero, you go on a journey and you get distracted by side-quests. All of which are linear and have little to no influence on your main story... any "difference" you might've made is only mentioned once in a dialogue or in a cutscene. This is essentially how every RPG works including MMOs.

Or maybe you're talking about the games that offer stories from subtle hints like the Dark Souls series... which can be played online with friends and strangers.

Whenever a game is online or offline has little to no impact on how a story is presented.