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Comment by ergonaught | Hacker News Reader

I guess we'll just call anything MMO now.

The term MMO is about the game/server architecture more than the size of the game. MMOs are online games with a single (or sharded) persistent gamestate. That's it.

Most shooters have rounds that restart, breaking the persistence quality of the game. Other games like Minecraft emphasize individual / private servers and break the "single gamestate" proposition. The "Massively" word refers to that single gamestate that many users can interact with, not how many do actually play.

To me, The "play offline" option is more against the MMO definition than the actual number of players.

I'm sure that's a fine take if you decide that "Massively Multiplayer" doesn't mean "Massively Multiplayer".

What would you call it? A small multiplayer online?

"Multiplayer" or "Online Multiplayer". Pretty common in the days before WoW. They didn't invent "MMO" (was that Ultima?), but people called those a lot of different things, like "MUD" or "MUCK", because the niches played differently. MMO became a catch all around the time of WoW, though. Made for a clear, simple distinction between internet scale player count games and countable concurrent player games.

Edit: didn't realize you were the author, asking a practical question about how to describe your project. Sorry about that. For that, I personally think you're fine. You're trying to tell people what it is, not be super technically accurate.

> Edit: didn't realize you were the author, asking a practical question about how to describe your project. Sorry about that. For that, I personally think you're fine. You're trying to tell people what it is, not be super technically accurate.

So if they weren’t the author you’d be tickety-boo with this smart-ass rude reply? Christ almighty.

What was smart asssed, or rude, about it? That's what those games are called. GoldenEye was multiplayer. Halo 2 was online multiplayer. If you were asking what to call a game that has P2P multiplayer support using webrtc and therefore only supported countable concurrent players, my honest thought would be to call it an online multiplayer game and forget about the "massive" part because it's just not relevant. Even though it is meant to mimic the gameplay of games that happen to be MMOs doesn't mean it needs to adopt the moniker. Final fantasy 12 mimicked the gameplay of MMOs, but it's just a "single player game".

On the contrary, if you're trying to convey to a mass audience that what you have built resembles something else, the best strategy is to reference that thing by its most familiar name.

Sorry if I came off as petty. Was just trying to answer honestly, and realized I didn't have the right context.

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