Taking lessons from the rise and fall of divinity in online games (2014)
nautil.us
nautil.us
Early Ultima Online had the makings of the most scalable player-driven/secular solution: karma (reputation). It operated on simple rules to identify good guys and bad guys so it couldn't capture all forms of griefing but it laid out a way for players to identify and police themselves without "Gods" (for the most part). Serial Player Killers (PKs) would earn negative reputation and titles (e.g. Dread Lord). If a PK was spotted near a town, a posse would form to hunt them down.
Later versions of UO rolled back this system, unfortunately, and even introduced servers where PvP was not allowed. This had the unfortunate consequence that PvP server users were seen as asking for a fight.
Maybe we would if it was physically impossible to use violence. That we haven't figured out a way around it under realistic conditions doesn't mean that it couldn't work under the completely arbitrary conditions that a game imposes.
I'm using "state sponsoroed violence" in broad strokes. Without PvP in player-governed game worlds, you can't even really enforce simple jail time.
Just give everyone the XP. (This is an example of why XP is silly.) There are already MMOs that have done this.
Without PvP in player-governed game worlds, you can't even really enforce simple jail time.
What if you teleported those player's characters into room with no doors? (Or a swimming pool with no ladder.)
The one such that I'm familiar with is Guild Wars 2, which is entirely designed around collaborative-only player interactions. All players hitting a mob will get the XP. All players get their own copies of resource nodes. You can just join in to group quests without being in the group, and everyone wins.
There are still ways to grief other players, though. For example, there's one world event I stumbled into where some mobs spawn, and if they're not killed in a certain amount of time, they spawn a boss mob. Not knowing this, I happily completed the first event... and got cussed out by a raid group that was waiting nearby for the big guy to spawn. I'm sure someone who actually wanted to disadvantage other players would find many more such examples.
I'm recalling an alternative that I experienced where a high fidelity game allowed for players to decide and carry out justice on other players. The company did not need to expend a great deal of time and energy policing the world.
Happened in MUDs. Also, it's basically the main mode of transportation in space MMOs.
It's been years, so I'm having trouble remembering the exact mechanics, but I recall it being non-trivial to continually murder PCs while maintaining a positive reputation. The most efficient way to do this would have been to kill dragons, and you needed to be a "tamer class" to do that efficiently. Most PKs weren't tamers. Also, having 5+ long term murders and a "red" name floating above your character was a dead giveaway that your character was up to no good.
I felt the system was brilliant and going on a PK hunt was the best fun ever. My brothers and I played UO from the moment it came out for another ~4 years (basically to whenever the non-PvP stuff came out, that turned us way off from the game).
The best thing about UO was how real the game was. Far more life-like than any other MMORPG I've ever seen and it came out in the 90's.
I only played UO for a month or two. The only skill I leveled up significantly was Hiding. I'd go where the loot was, and adventure for a few minutes until the inevitable gang of PKers came wandering through, looking to loot all the players like me. Some players ran, some hid, most died.
If you successfully hid, your player would be invisible to everyone else. So the PKers would walk a pattern through the dungeon, trying to step on every square. As a cowardly hiding level 1 character, I'd wait in hiding as long as I could, then jump out of hiding when I saw a chance to escape. Invariably I'd be spotted. I'd run around a corner, hide again, and the process would restart. I swear I spent more time hiding behind rocks than fighting whatever monsters the game made available to low level players. I could never tell if I was having fun or not!
Reminds me a little bit of REAMDE.
> The only skill I leveled up significantly was Hiding. I'd go where the loot was, and adventure for a few minutes until the inevitable gang of PKers came wandering through, looking to loot all the players like me. Some players ran, some hid, most died.
Really expected your story to be focused on scavenging the loot the PKers left behind.
I can't imagine how the UO devs thought this might be a turnoff for new players.
Now the article claims that "gods are almost entirely absent from online worlds" – something I severely doubt. Take for instance this message board: is HN completely anarchistic? Not so likely. Is it meritocratically governed? We'd like to think so. Or do "gods" – those who write exist here as well?
When it turns out Spez (Founder and Arch-Wizard of Reddit) has the power to change contents of users' comments on reddit – and exercises this power for his own apparent amusement – is he not a "god in an online world"?
When I read Lorry's manifesto, about the hierarchies of essentially mods on his MUD, its difficult not to think of all the mods, supermods and admins on message boards large and small across the Internet.
WoW certainly has Gods, but they are prevented by certain Covenants from manifesting their powers except in limited cases...
Anyone happen to have a copy of this manifesto? The page links to a 404, and archive.org only has a copy from 2016 - which is a 404 as well.
I was wondering if that was the same "Lorry" as the (in)famous UK ISP "Lorry" and, yep, it's him. Looks like the article just missed the trailing 'l' off the URL (linked via his Wikipedia page) ->
It was quite an inspiration to the admins of the MUDs I played back in the mid to late 90's.
I wish to object to these statements.
Gods in online communities aren’t totally lost, they’ve just reduced in scope to smaller private servers in more niche games.
> Community users couldn’t turn to the wizards; they had grown tired of settling social arguments in the large world, and forced players to come to collective agreement before they would mete our justice. Enough players wanted to “toad” Mr. Bungle—a variation on the Finger of Death—to get the superpowers who ran the servers’ attention, and the sentence was meekly carried out.
I have two examples in mind:
Riot implemented a player tribunal in League Of Legends. Players would examine chat logs to judge verbal abuse and misconduct cases. Eventually a Riot employee would decide on the punishment (warning or temporary or permanent ban). I don't know if this system is still in place, but at the time they reported good results and players saw it as an improvement.
A French high-school is using Minetest (a FOSS Minecraft) to run a student-driven server. The "administrator" chose to let the player-students do their own thing with as little intervention as possible. The admin even created a reward system granting privileges (fly, ban) up to full admin powers (that is, a god).
They saw player-students create a laws, then a police and then a tribunal. For sure those kids got a better understanding of the society they live in.
In one case, the admin invited his colleagues to introduce them to the tool/game. Those people were clueless and apparently thought that because they were teachers, they were above the rules. The student-players banned them.
Games being an entertainment-only device is a severe misconception. Online interaction in an MMO or a MOBA is often a form of social training. One role of games is to allow to experiment with dangerous things safely. The pseudonymous online society allows people to test different behaviors on others, and I believe that some of the "toxicity" comes from that.
So Godhood is a way for people to experiment with the exercise of power. And as the article concludes, "it ain't that fun after all".
I believe that if more people could have the chance to come to that conclusion, that being able to do anything is not fun, it would be a significant contribution to humanity I believe. Because it seems to me that too many people are driven by the delusion of wealth and power.
I'm super stoked that students ran their own in-game government, where no citizen was above the law. I'm curious what rules the teachers ran afoul of.
Er... this doesn't sound right.
$13.3B in 2010
$14.7B in 2011
$14.3B in 2012
$15.6B in 2013
$17.3B in 2014
So presuming the article was written prior to the 2013 GDP figures being released then the statement was indeed correct when made (and may still be barring new information about revenue growth).