Are We A MMO?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Trina, Jul 24, 2017.

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  1. DeadnGone

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    Alright, you are just nitpicking to make it fit your own ideas of an MMO now. A chat room thats not a game isnt an MMO now is it? You are taking it to extremes here. You started with a reference to thousands of players playing the same game at the same time and now you're jumping to 5v5, 1v1 and a chat room... really?

    Again, more extremism. Steam is not "a game".

    Any game that is put out in online format that has many people playing at the same time with one another, note not needing to be all in the same instance of the game, is an MMO. It doesn't have to support millions or thousands. It could simply be just 200 players and still be an MMO.

    I believe I read your reference here and I believe you are taking it out of context. Besides, there are already definitions for MMO's/MMORPGs. This does not change that.

    Seriously, you think that everything has to be one instance for it to be an MMO? Your line of reasoning is out of whack and completely unrealistic on this issue. But you can keep saying, "No it isn't", and refuting any well grounded and longstanding definitions if you want to, it still doesn't mean it isn't so.
     
  2. StrangerDiamond

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    Cayenne on a stick, I had never seen that one... hats off :D
     
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  3. Ristra

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    I am hardly nit picking. I am using an extreme counter balance to an equally extreme loose definition.

    You claim that a 30 vs 30 with a lobby where an infinite number of player can join is an MMO. I say where does that line get drawn? 15 vs 15 10 vs 10? Or is it the millions or hundreds?

    I say it's neither. It's the persistent world. SotA fits that standard for MMO but SotA also isn't the typical version of that. Selective Multiplayer is a curveball. We as the player can chose to play the game without physical interaction with other players. However the housing and vendors are still persistent.

    We are effectively arguing that Star Trek's 3d chess is chess. Of course it is but the standard rules of chess don't work with 3d chess. Still is chess though right.

    If you want to call a massive pool of players lobbied together an MMO more power to you and I support you. I won't be using that definition myself though.
     
  4. DeadnGone

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    You should probably actually look up the definitions of MMOs & MMORPGs before trying to superimpose your beliefs onto the definition.
     
  5. StrangerDiamond

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    I think its time to break the mainstream definitions :p

    Even dictionaries change, from time to tome :)
     
  6. DeadnGone

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    Yeah, that does not change the definitions because you wish it to be.
     
  7. Net

    Net Avatar

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    What is MMO boils down to oyur definition of "massive". Pretty sure that anything beyond 16 or 32 players used to be considered massive. My favourite MMO is Trackmania, which is neither roleplaying nor has persistent world. It supports over 100 players so it is massive to a degree, especially compared to other racing games.

    Not sure why anyone thought that Massive Multiplayer Online Game needs different definition than it is an online multiplayer game with huge amount of players.. but then RPGs are not about roleplaying much and more about characters levelling up for some reason:D
     
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  8. StrangerDiamond

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    Wanna bet ? :)


    oh common I'm kidding... take it easy, we DESERVE to be a MMO cause f* we backed the guy who started the ball, so that he and his friends could have a job doing art, which takes an indefinite amount of time.

    Period. Case closed.
     
  9. StrangerDiamond

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    *bangs head on desk* 32 players was NEVER considered massive, are you SERIOUS ?#@! Richard Gariott invented MASSIVE+LY. Why do you all keep ignoring me anyways, as I've said earlier its AN EXPRESSION, its not an official word its an acronym, a convention.

    Then we proceeded with impeccable logic and determined that WoW came and ruined it for everyone with a cheap band-aid fix. But who writes history ? You all know the answer to this riddle...

    But see we are NOT taking ourselves seriously, we exaggerate because thats the thread, thats where we've ended up by stretching the ink a little too much.

    Time has come to stop ignoring who we are.
     
  10. DeadnGone

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    Not "massively". He coined the term "massively multiplayer online ROLE PLAYING GAME" with the RPG at the end. Apparently from various sources the MMO/MMOG term came from Dale Addink at an E3 convention in 1995. Not sure if he was even first but that it was referenced earlier.
     
  11. Lord_Darkmoon

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    I think that the basics of a MMORPG are "wrong" if people are looking for a story.

    I was introduced to RPGs with D&D. I played pen & paper RPGs for a very long time. I read many novels which were released to accompany the RPGs. I was in love with The Lord of the Rings. I loved CRPGs like Bard's Tale, of course Ultima, Pool of Radiance etc. So what I am looking for in a game is to experience a great, epic story.
    When MMORPGs came up I realised very early that the concept of a pen & paper RPG doesn't really work here.
    In a pen & paper RPG there is this one group of players who does this epic adventure which has an impact on the world. The same for the novels. There is this one group of heroes who save the world. In the Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship has this grand adventure and defeats Sauron. In a regular MMORPG this is not possible. Because there is not this one group which saves the world, this one Fellowship which defeats Sauron. Nearly everyone is a hero and everyone saves the world and defeats Sauron. But this doesn't work. If everyone defeats Sauron the whole purpose of defeating him is gone. Why do it when he respawns and everyone else does it, too? The world can never be saved. Sauron can never be defeated and heroes are everywhere which effectively makes being a hero obsolete. The whole story falls apart.

    Yes there are "new" rechnologies like phasing or instances. Yet the basic problem is still there. In MY game, in MY world, everyone is doing the same things. I cannot be the one who saves the world because 1. everyone else does it too and 2. the world cannot be saved. Maybe in Guild Wars 2 there are Special events that expire but this also leads to me not being able to play at my pace. I HAVE to play in order to experience this story.

    Such things would never work in a novel or in a pen & paper RPG. But in a computergame we have to accept it. Yes it is fun playing together with others, meeting other players, new friends, doing adventures together, but the story and the immerson suffer because of this.
    It's the aspect "massively" that doesn't work as soon as there is a story which wants to be told. 100 Fellowships wanting to defeat Sauron and ultimately accomplishing this, while 100 Fellowships still wait in line to defeat him... Imagine this in a novel.
    Massively works in a sandbox game in which there are no quests you do. A sandbox in which players create their own adventures and thus, every adventure is unique. But as soon as there are quests in a game telling a story, the whole game falls apart as this takes away the feeling of being the hero who can save the world, the feeling of accomplising something. Therefore I think that the basics of a MMORPG are wrong as soon as the game wants to tell a story with quests.
     
  12. StrangerDiamond

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    Figures... of course I'm talking about origin systems inc and not only RG, and I'm talking about when Massive+LY became meaningful not who actually invented the term. My subjective viewpoint is that you are being waayyyyy surrealrational about this.

    In fact the thread would be much more consctructive if everyone just gave their definition of a MMO and we'd skip the back and forth on something that clearly has depth for some and is simple for others.
     
  13. Ristra

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    You've out right called first person shooters MMO. I'm not the one with MMO wrong. But, as I have said. It's a meta tag and irrelevant to what is actually in a game.
     
  14. StrangerDiamond

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    I think you'll have to say it again, it made my coffee go down all wrong :p
     
  15. Gix

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    What is a "regular MMORPG" ?

    You still don't understand. Sauron would only exist in your game and you would only see the other players who are also striving to defeat Sauron. The moment you kill Sauron, the other players who have yet to defeat him wouldn't be in your game because now you live in a world where Sauron is dead.

    You mention pen and paper D&D. Imagine a scenario where you rented a room to play a particular campaign and that every other room in the complex is also hosting other players playing through that same campaign. Are you suddenly thrown out of your fantasy because you met those players in the cafeteria?

    You play Skyrim and you notice that everybody in your apartment complex is playing Skyrim... what happens then?

    You say "yet the problem is still there" and I'm telling you that "the problems were there in single-player all along".

    You HAVE to play to experience any story, dude.

    Well, first of all, I'd be the first one to tell you that Unity's not the problem. I work with Unity on a daily basis. Albion Online IS a Unity game. Unity just has a bad rep because there's a lot of horrible developers who think they can just buy Unity Store assets and make a AAA-quality title by just mashing random scripts together. Those who use a free licence of Unity can't get rid of the "Made with Unity" splash screen and those who actually have a budget (normally because they're payed professionals) have a pro licence that doesn't showcase that it's made with Unity... so you're more likely to see Unity associated with crappy games.

    Whatever engine you use like Unreal, Cry, Lumberyard, Frostbite, Unity, or Hammer, it's not going to be as good as a custom-built engine like, say, the one created for Camelot-Unchained. This is true for both frame-rate and networking performance as well as visual quality.

    No game runs perfectly smooth and well DURING development; some don't even run well until a few days before they go Gold. Others still don't run well even after release. What you see in SotA is actually better than what most games in that stage of development usually performs.

    Your ability to play with hundreds of people is influenced by two things: frame-rate and bandwidth. In the case of SotA, both of these things are still being worked on and what makes the game particularly more taxing (on both fronts) is one word: Dynamism.

    The more dynamic objects you have in a given scene whenever it's a player, an NPC, a door, a candle, a school of fish, a house, a garden, a corpse, a particle effect, whatever, the more taxing it is for the computer to draw and keep track of. Another thing to consider is that mostly everything in a game is computed on a "per-frame" basis. That means that, if your FPS is low, chances are you're not communicating to the server as often as someone who's got a high FPS.

    There's more to it to 3D-Games than just an extra axis and coordinate. 3D is WAY more intensive than 2D sprites but we use 3D because it looks cooler, it allows us to do more interesting things in terms of game-play (if we decide to take advantage of it) AND it's easier to produce compared to hand-drawn sprites. A character animation is no longer a series of sprites displayed in rapid succession, now the CPU has to handle character rigs, the animation key-frames, bone weights on mesh and then the GPU helps out with texture mapping, shading, etc. That's the cost for just an animation.

    How you tell the computer to draw things also influences how fast it'll draw the final image. That requires specific organization that you can't easily get in a dynamic environment as it risks influencing how particular objects will look.
    In the case of Unity, Unity has a way to batch render objects. That function combines every game object in the scene that shares the same "criteria" and renders them in one go instead of doing each object individually. Aka: it's faster. Here's the catch, though, the criteria is that objects in a batch must share the same material (texture) and be influenced by the same light sources.

    Say you have a table and a chair and both use the same "wood" material (having a chair share the same texture as a table can look odd but bear with me), those two objects can be batched. If you put a candle on top of the table and the chair isn't affected by that light, they can no longer be batched. So not only are you trying to organize your materials but you want to organize your lighting too...

    ... and you're trying to do that when the game allows players to decorate their homes...

    This is why most games don't do this. There's a difference between filling a room with static wooden crates that the game only has to think about once, and filling a room with dynamic wooden crates where the player may or may not decide to move them. Even if the wooden crates don't move in the room for both examples, one will have a better performance over the other as the latter will constantly have to be aware of where those crates are.

    So when you say "you lag in Ardoris", all this crap comes into play.

    The whole idea that your computer is X times more powerful than what you had in the past has no real bearings on the situation because we've made things Y times more intensive on the hardware despite the tricks we use.

    Yes but they're making SotA for PC, Mac, Linux specifically... they didn't make the same kind of decisions as the Albion's dev team did.

    The mobile platform has WAY more restrictions on what you can and can't do while keeping a high frame-rate and preserving battery life. That's why Albion Online looks and plays the way it is.

    I hope that answers some of your questions/concerns.
     
    Last edited: Jul 26, 2017
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  16. StrangerDiamond

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    It does, thank you very much...

    That combined with the silly cloud security tokens I guess is the culprit... I had no idea the game was communicating with the server on a frame to frame basis... it seems to me that whoever made those badnwidth calculations didn't know how expensive that is. I guess thats why DS said in the very early releases that the "server bill was too high"...

    Can you give a few examples of what Albion did to manage such bandwidth reduction ? It must be something more than just less dynamic objects ?
     
  17. DeadnGone

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    Some FPS games are MMO's... wow, you really are out of touch with reality.
     
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  18. LoneStranger

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    You guys are arguing over terms that don't have concrete and agreed-upon definitions over the whole breadth of the industry.
     
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  19. Cordelayne

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    Is this where we are right now? Have things gotten so bad that we have devolved to arguing with each other about what encompasses being called an MMO? :rolleyes:

    Aren't there more constructive things to discuss, without the snide comments and remarks? What are we? Twelve?

    [​IMG]
     
  20. DeadnGone

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    Stop trying to tap dance back and forth. You literally said RG invented the term "massively", when he coined the term mmorpg instead. Don't try and say you didn't now. You're not adding anything constructive to this thread but just trying to throw fluff around and make it seem like you have some deep, enlightened, insight on the matter when you really do not.
     
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