#17: Money

[Prometheus]

Commenting on the latest article :)

[Soterios]

I think you misdirect the blame for customer desire for rapid fixes to perceived problems. It has nothing to do with the "Internet Time" buzzwords and everything to do with one of the intrinsic weaknesses of MMORPGs in general when compared to the more traditional face-to-face RPGs.

Using your example of a balance issue of Fighting Class A vis a vis some item and the impact of any changes upon Spellcasting Class B: in a real RPG this sort of thing is largely a non-issue. If I'm playing a pencil-and-paper RPG and I come across a rule that doesn't seem to work, I change it (or ignore it or whatever) and carry on playing. My players get an instant correction of a perceived problem in "Internet Time" -- and have since 1974 when the first tabletop RPG came out. (That would be long before the Internet was a phenomenon worth noting to 99%+ of the population.) If it happens to turn out that a correction has unintended side-effects, another minor correction is made and the game goes on.

Computer-moderated games, whether MM or not, do not have this flexibility. There is a key ingredient missing in actually running these games: human judgement. The computer can only do what it has been programmed to do; no more, no less. There is no ability for someone to look and say "that just plain doesn't make sense so from now on class A can do thing X". Instead, when such a problem is perceived, players have to contact a customer service rep, wait for the customer service rep to investigate, wait for the customer service rep to formulate the request for engineering, wait for engineering to implement and test the change -- all to find out, perhaps, in the end that the change doesn't address the problem in the expected or desired way. What would in a real RPG be done in seconds, perhaps minutes is now done in days, perhaps weeks and even months. If there actually is a very real problem, that's days/weeks/months in which your character is somehow disadvantaged and your game play is negatively impacted. And that's the kind of thing that's going to generate a lot of negative feelings.

Let's take this home with a concrete example of what I'm talking about. Let's talk about my character in Castle Marrach.

When I came in, due to a variety of reasons I decided to take my character in the direction of being someone's personal valet instead of the more usual course of joining a guild and presumably working my way up the ziggarut. In general response to this idea was favorable. Two StoryPlotters praised the idea, in fact, as a good way to introduce something new to the setting that made sense and didn't involve, in the words of one of the SPs, "making the Happiness Guild". So what problem developed in this role that seemed to be such a good fit to the setting? I wanted two items to do the job right: a scroll case (for handling my "master's" correspondence) and a clothing brush (as a prop to clean his clothes). Neither of these two items existed in the game as yet.

In a tabletop RPG, the fact that neither of these items existed in the equipment charts would have been a non-issue to all but the most ham-fisted of GMs. A quick scan of the equipment lists and a small dose of good old human judgement later would have me my scroll case (complete with rules as to how much of what can be carried in it) and my brush. And, for good measure, prices, a range of descriptions (for assorted levels of quality), a good idea of where to get such items and so forth. The total time taken: MAYBE fifteen minutes assuming a completist GM who doesn't "wing" anything.

In Castle Marrach's environment it took days. Just to make the items, mind you. I still haven't actually seen them in-game because the mechanism for delivering them in-character is as yet undetermined.

Now my concern in this instance was minor, so the irritation factor was very small. I could still act the servant role without the props. (Indeed my only problem in acting the servant role was other players, not the lack of a scroll case and brush.) If this was a real problem in the game, however, and not just a minor bit of missing color, I can see a player getting very irritable. Irritable to the point of whining bitterly on any accessible public forum.

So, I really do think you're pointing the finger of blame in the wrong direction when you blame misguided notions of "Internet Time" for the customer expectations you've seen. Customer expectations for response time were set long before even the word "Internet" was on most peoples' radars.

[Atama]

Computer-moderated games, whether MM or not, do not have this flexibility. There is a key ingredient missing in actually running these games: human judgement. The computer can only do what it has been programmed to do; no more, no less. There is no ability for someone to look and say "that just plain doesn't make sense so from now on class A can do thing X".

Actually, you missed the mark completely here. In fact, your statement itself is wrong. You are on the right track, though.

Human judgement is always in play. Humans wrote the MM game, humans will fix it. Just the same as a paper RPG.

The difference has nothing to do with the medium. The different has to do with the scope.

If you had a MMORPG which worked like a paper RPG this wouldn't be a problem quite so much. If you had, say, one programmer, and 4 players, who were always playing simultaneously, minor problems could be fixed quickly. Of course, this is assuming a really basic online RPG which simple code. (It would have to be to be similar to the typical paper RPG, which has clear rules that the lay person can follow, unless you play Shadowrun.)

In a MMORPG, you are talking a few, to maybe dozens of coders, compared to hundreds or thousands of players. Things get more complicated.

Let's say, you had only one GM playing D&D. And he had, say, 30-40 players. Who showed up at varying times. One guy played a barbarian, another a necromancer, a third a thief... And the thief complained cause he could never make a pickpocket roll. So you alter the rules, and then he steals everyone else blind. So they complain, and you moderate it. But then the wizard dies too quickly, so you make it so wizards are harder to kill. Then the wizard that the party runs into easily zaps everyone. Now imagine this is happening with dozens of players, and imagine that they are all paying to play in your game, and that you need their money to keep the game going...

See my point? It's not so much the fact that it is an online computer game. It's the fact that online computer games are huge and complex. The vast scope is what makes it so hard. If the guy making your brush didn't have dozens of other things to make for everyone else you could probably have gotten it right away.

By the way, congrats on how quickly you got your stuff. Usually when I have a request it never ever arrives. :D But I understand, they are busy.