Originally posted by Quizzical There are at least two big problems. First, how do you make a political system in which tens of thousands of people can meaningfully participate. Second, how do you make the political system have meaningful consequences without ruining the game for a large fraction of your playerbase?
In the sense that when it matters to the game, it matters to the members of a guild, who hold the leadership of the guild responsible for their decisions.
However some people aren't interested in the why, they just shoot the people the leadership tell them to.
Exactly. You give them the tools to enforce their rules and seize control, and let them decide within their own potlitical and strategic mechanations how they wish to go about that. This allows those that want to take the reigns to do so, those that want to rally behind a flag to do so, and those who want to stay uninvolved to, well, just like real life live under whatever rules are set forth by their local governing body.
"Encouraging player politics is surprisingly easy. Look at World of Tanks: Add a clanwars map and give rewards to those who have managed to claim and hold area. Instant politics. Drama too, sadly." - Quirhid
I'm not too familair with that system. Can you link to an article or forum thread on the politics behind that.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
That's one way to look at it. However, another view of it is that Goonswarm is not really winning anything meaningful. They are gettign a lot of publicity but many players simply choose to ignore them in the longrun. Ultimately most big corps are not brought down by politics or intrigue but boredom. A few key leaders get bored and either quit the game or start making stupid decisions in order to 'spice things up'.
I was once a member of a large guild where factions started forming up and disputes started erupting among the leadership. Just as the politics were heating up, a few of the key member got bored of the guild drama and simply took a break from the game. Before the 'winning' faction could start celebrating, a new expansion came up and everyone else quickly forgot about the dispute and went back to playing the game.
Unless you give guilds/corpe/factions real power over the game world, most players will quickly get bored of politics and go back to playing the game. It is like having a game of Survivor where there is no big prize at the end and people that were elimintated can rejoin at any point they want. At some point even the most dedicated competitor will get bored and stop playing.
The Goons are winning something meaningful, their alliance allows them to control swathes of 0.0 and the resources they get from that.
What game were you playing when the guild drama happened and what made the politics meaningful, what was there to gain?
It's only meaningfull if you care about 0.0. To the players who do not care about 0.0, the influence of Goonswarm is only tangental. ie it is only meaningful to the people who think it is meaningful.
The guild drama happened during the later stages of Vanilla WoW. The dispute was over changes to our raid DKP policy. The more dedicated progression raiders wanted implement a new system that rewarded agressive progression raiding. The more casual raiders prefered the old system which was designed for slower paced raiding. The progression faction consisted mostly of newer players who joined the guild primarily to raid. The casual faction consisted of many of the Old Guard, members who have been with the guild for years and joined the guild when it was an Earth & Beyond guild or when it moved to SWG.
In retrospective it was an extremely silly dispute but we were too obsessed with the raiding system that we built up that we were oblivious to how meaningless it was. Two months later the expansion hit and the issue became moot forever. It became clear that we allowed ourself to be trapped in a system created to compensate for the flawed design of vanilla WoW raiding.
What one group of players will see as meaningful politics and intrigue, another group will see as silly guild drama.
It's only politics if it affects the game world, if not its just guild drama.
re: 0:0 politics, it is meaningful as it affects the supply and demand of the materials that drive the game. In the same way that the average joe pays no attention to politics, he is still affected by it even if he doesn't care what is happening.
Actually, the supply & demand is really controlled by CCP. They control the drop rate of items and therefore control the inflation. There is an argument that minerals and gases can fluctuate wildly, but on the whole the prices are fairly stable (other than Hulkageddon) as is the prices of plex which will eventually be managed by a CCP bank of sorts. Null sec only matters to those in null sec, in truth the large alliances influence over the wider economy in eve is minimal as most resource gathering and mining is outsourced to smaller corps or is happening in high sec or WH. In fact, I would go as far to say that large alliances such as the goons, power is based more on notoriaty than any real political or financial power. Far from being the alliance that destabilizes the game, they have been actually a stabilizing influence in the game.
"Actually, the supply & demand is really controlled by CCP. They control the drop rate of items and therefore control the inflation."
You are confusing control with regulation. The distinction lies in that the players control the fluctuation and CCP regulates how far to each end it is allowed to drift. Player control is also far more dynamic and immediately reactionary (at an almost transaction level basis), whereas the regulation is actually few and far between (expansion and patch updates, when and if deemed necessary). To give an example, players control the cost of Tritanium. If something happened that the cost of tritanium started going through the roof, the devs would assess if it is natural market or otherwise. If it is natural free market fluctuation, they would leave it be unless it reached some truly insane proportion.
"In fact, I would go as far to say that large alliances such as the goons, power is based more on notoriaty than any real political or financial power."
It's a safe bet that every miner and industrialist that has either lost assets or made bank as a result of Hulkageddon or Burn Jita would disagree with that statement. I'd venture to say that a lot of pet corps and moon miners would disagree, as well.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
"Encouraging player politics is surprisingly easy. Look at World of Tanks: Add a clanwars map and give rewards to those who have managed to claim and hold area. Instant politics. Drama too, sadly." - Quirhid
I'm not too familair with that system. Can you link to an article or forum thread on the politics behind that.
Sadly, no. I only talk from experience since I was somewhat involved. There were powerblocks or alliances, all sorst of deals from non-aggression pacts, mercenaries to defense agreements and how the gold (cash shop currency in WoT) is distributed amongst the clans that worked to gether.
In a nutshell: Clans battle over the areas in a series of instanced battles. They move around pieces that represent tanks on the browser-based out-of-the-game map board. They capture an area, the clan gets a fixed gold amount every hour. Some areas are more valuable than others. The map is also divided into timezones half hour wide and every night, from right to left, the battles in the map board are resolved. This works sort of like an invitational match ingame. The timezones create this wonky metagame that it is better for the clans to spread east-west direction rather than north-south to avoid battles being overlapped within the same half-hour.
New clans enter the board from special "landing sites" where there's essentially a mini tournament every night with the winner is pitted against the current owner. If they manage to land i.e. capture the landing site, they are recommended to move their pieces on an adjecent area, to attack, in order to not have to defend their area in the tournament finals. Established clans spawn more pieces from headquarters which they can build on an area they choose. It is not recommended to build an HQ on a landing site since it will be under attack every night.
There was some talk about building infrastructure and adding espionage on the map, but I burned out of WoT long before they implemented anything.
TL;DR: Risk type world map where battles are resolved in instanced matches.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
When will an mmorpg succeed to finallygive us an endgame base on politics and intrigue? The more i look at game of thrones, midkemia and other fantasy epos, he more i realise this is what is missing.... A way to infuence the world trough roleplaying..
but how to put this intoo a simple mmo?
You mean like EVE? Where Alliances are fickle and trust is a hard sought commodity?
Yup, for politics and intrigue the gameplay needs to matter to the game world, getting the best stuff in an instance negates all the need for politics. You need open world PvP and resource/territory control along with open faction/guild alliances allowed to change over time
Games like this already exsist where player politic matter, the problem is that most people find that the AAA companies are playing it safe and making the same game reskinned over and over again. I suggest you check out darkfall unholy wars it may not be as polished as games u expect since most people dont play thing other than AAA develeoped game however it offers everything you said above.
I always expected to see this in MMORPG's when I first started playing them many years ago, but instead I got dissapointed by instances, raids and battlegrounds. It seems now though that MMORPG's are shifting to this, would be awesome if we could see the stuff that Shadowbane had again.
As others have mentioned, unformalized politics and drama is surprisingly easy to implement.
But I wouldn't mind seeing a formalized system of politics created in a game, where you interact with NPCs who have agendas that can be spied or implied, and favor to be curried. You could make a real game of it.
Game of Thrones is entertaining because it hops to all the interesting political events and skips the trivial ones. So unlike "real" videogame politics where I'm sure you could spend thousands (if not tens of thousands) of hours in EVE between major political events, Game of Thrones is all of the major events stacked end-to-end. That's what makes it good entertainment.
A politics videogame which formalizes politics via game systems would be similar. Every session you'd have a major political event(s). It would be rich, dense politics, and make for good entertainment.
There are a good number of political simulators out there, but one that sticks out in my mind as a good system was from Europa 1400 The Guild where most of the game is about running a business (carpentry, blacksmithing, etc) in the year 1400, but there's also a significant political system. You compete against other businessmen to be favored with the guild, and if your perfume manufacturer opponent is pulling ahead you can do things like make perfume illegal to trip them up. It just requires earning enough political clout to be able to even propose the measure in the first place, and then having enough government members fond of you to see it pass.
Then again, you might forgo the favor-currying and just hire an assassination on the guy (but there's a certain amount of risk associated with that.) The economy simulation isn't the funnest I've ever played but the overall game was quite a unique experience that I recommend if all of that sounds interesting to you. The most frustrating part was sometimes the game was inexplicably obtuse, so you'd have some simple goal in mind (improve favor with Joe Butcher) but no clear paths to achieve that goal, even though in real life it's something you could just walk up and do.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I always expected to see this in MMORPG's when I first started playing them many years ago, but instead I got dissapointed by instances, raids and battlegrounds. It seems now though that MMORPG's are shifting to this, would be awesome if we could see the stuff that Shadowbane had again.
Game of Thrones is entertaining because it hops to all the interesting political events and skips the trivial ones.
I don't think it is just the political events. GoT is good because of the characters and writing. You can create that kind of story lines and events without the best professional writers money can buy.
When will an mmorpg succeed to finallygive us an endgame base on politics and intrigue? The more i look at game of thrones, midkemia and other fantasy epos, he more i realise this is what is missing.... A way to infuence the world trough roleplaying..
but how to put this intoo a simple mmo?
If you want to truly influence the game world and be involved in politics that actually matter, than check out Origins of Malu. Factions are entirely player created and controlled, cities and towns are player created and controlled (also good for the crafters!), faction territories are player created and controlled. This game has so much promise right now, I just hope it all turns out well!
I think adding political systems into a game would make it really fun, add another aspect to the entire experience. MMOs are the perfect medium for political systems since your playing with x amount of other people that have the same rights and privileges. It's not about one single player, at least not where reason is concerned.
As far as how to implement? Tera had an addon essentially for politics that didn't really effect those uninterested but I don't think it was that robust. You could intertwine politics into a game that had seperate "kingdoms" that allowed a dev to moderate the framework. This would be the most likely result in a non open PvP game.
Another is to provide a medium like EvE does where the politics just happen. This IMO is the easiest way to provide politics but I wouldn't prefer it.
I don't think it is just the political events. GoT is good because of the characters and writing. You can create that kind of story lines and events without the best professional writers money can buy.
Well it tends to be mostly political events, but whether they're political or not isn't actually important.
What's important is they skip hundreds of hours of people uneventfully walking across a desert. That's not included in the book nor the series, nor should it be included in a MMORPG game trying to mimick the IP's success.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I don't think it is just the political events. GoT is good because of the characters and writing. You can create that kind of story lines and events without the best professional writers money can buy.
Well it tends to be mostly political events, but whether they're political or not isn't actually important.
What's important is they skip hundreds of hours of people uneventfully walking across a desert. That's not included in the book nor the series, nor should it be included in a MMORPG game trying to mimick the IP's success.
Not only that .. the other important point is that good professional writers are creating those events that are interesting, and fit to the characters. I care very little about some guy got his head chopped off, but i care a great deal about Ned Stark's head got chopped off, particulary because how he was betrayed.
This kind of interesting stuff will never happen in a million years in a MMO if you let players do whatever.
This kind of interesting stuff will never happen in a million years in a MMO if you let players do whatever.
Er, no, it definitely does happen.
There are a few very major EVE political/economic plots that have happened over the years. And they do make great stories. But they make great stories when condensed down to the eventful moments, just like Game of Thrones is written.
They don't make great stories when experienced first-hand as a game. Behind every fantastic EVE story is literally hundreds of thousands of gameplay hours of mind-numbing boredom.
So don't pretend these types of events never happen. They do happen, they just happen so rarely that the overall game is mind-numbingly boring.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
This kind of interesting stuff will never happen in a million years in a MMO if you let players do whatever.
Er, no, it definitely does happen.
There are a few very major EVE political/economic plots that have happened over the years. And they do make great stories. But they make great stories when condensed down to the eventful moments, just like Game of Thrones is written.
They don't make great stories when experienced first-hand as a game. Behind every fantastic EVE story is literally hundreds of thousands of gameplay hours of mind-numbing boredom.
So don't pretend these types of events never happen. They do happen, they just happen so rarely that the overall game is mind-numbingly boring.
And also, much of it is propaganda - fiction. There's a whole lot of bullshit flying around for whatever reason. Really you can be only sure what happened if you were there.
Goons in particular are quite the story-tellers.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
Basically it sounds like you want game politics to be as unlike real politics as possible. The truth is that politics are not interesting. But in entertainment we take out actual politics and put in a fake juiced up version. If you told the story of a real high school student's 4 years it would be boring as fuck. Yet high school drama shows and sit coms are super popular. Because they only show the good parts.
The problem you have is that in narrative entertainment the politics matter to the people involved because the director said so. Whereas in politics in a video game the politics can't just be assigned value they have to actually mean something to players. And they don't mean anything if you don't work for them. The boring stuff gives meaning to the fun parts.
And also in real politics there are winners and losers. In GoT or in Gossip Girl the losers aren't real. They have minimal characterization and they are being PERFORMED by actors. In a video game the losers have to be REAL. Played by players. After all they have to convince the winners that they actually won something. Again in narrative media you can just have the characters SAY that that is was hard and intense to win.
So to summarize:
In order for some people to win, some people have to lose. After all that's what drives your precious MOBAs and other "competitive" multiplayer shit you guys like. Winners and Losers. Half the player base of all those games is constantly losing over and over again.
Basically it sounds like you want game politics to be as unlike real politics as possible. The truth is that politics are not interesting. But in entertainment we take out actual politics and put in a fake juiced up version. If you told the story of a real high school student's 4 years it would be boring as fuck. Yet high school drama shows and sit coms are super popular. Because they only show the good parts.
The problem you have is that in narrative entertainment the politics matter to the people involved because the director said so. Whereas in politics in a video game the politics can't just be assigned value they have to actually mean something to players. And they don't mean anything if you don't work for them. The boring stuff gives meaning to the fun parts.
And also in real politics there are winners and losers. In GoT or in Gossip Girl the losers aren't real. They have minimal characterization and they are being PERFORMED by actors. In a video game the losers have to be REAL. Played by players. After all they have to convince the winners that they actually won something. Again in narrative media you can just have the characters SAY that that is was hard and intense to win.
So to summarize:
In order for some people to win, some people have to lose. After all that's what drives your precious MOBAs and other "competitive" multiplayer shit you guys like. Winners and Losers. Half the player base of all those games is constantly losing over and over again.
My high school experience was anything but boring. Drinking, getting laid, people committing suicide, drugs, fights, sports, girls slapping guys, guys slapping girls, people just losing it in class, teachers yelling at students, students yelling at teachers, sexual harassment, rumors of rape, cheating, expulsions, someone ran over six kids by accident when it was raining (2 survived), fixed student body elections, bullying, parties, betrayal, friendship, hatred, etc.
Drama was the name of the game in high school. I don't know if people just block out the crazy shit that goes on there, but my fairly nice public suburban high school certainly had its fair share of drama.
About the part in red specifically, that's not how ranking systems usually work. What they do is make system where a player wins half the time and loses half the time. They do this by placing you against players of a similar skill level. So if you start winning a lot, you start running into people that are more skilled than you and you get beaten back until you get better. If you start losing a lot, it pushes you back down to people that you will be more competitive with.
So ideally, all of the playerbase except for the top 1% or so are winning and losing at approximately an equal amount if they play enough games.
Basically it sounds like you want game politics to be as unlike real politics as possible. The truth is that politics are not interesting. But in entertainment we take out actual politics and put in a fake juiced up version. If you told the story of a real high school student's 4 years it would be boring as fuck. Yet high school drama shows and sit coms are super popular. Because they only show the good parts.
The problem you have is that in narrative entertainment the politics matter to the people involved because the director said so. Whereas in politics in a video game the politics can't just be assigned value they have to actually mean something to players. And they don't mean anything if you don't work for them. The boring stuff gives meaning to the fun parts.
And also in real politics there are winners and losers. In GoT or in Gossip Girl the losers aren't real. They have minimal characterization and they are being PERFORMED by actors. In a video game the losers have to be REAL. Played by players. After all they have to convince the winners that they actually won something. Again in narrative media you can just have the characters SAY that that is was hard and intense to win.
So to summarize:
In order for some people to win, some people have to lose. After all that's what drives your precious MOBAs and other "competitive" multiplayer shit you guys like. Winners and Losers. Half the player base of all those games is constantly losing over and over again.
Politics are plenty interesting.
We (mankind) create games about every skill which has perceived value. That's the fundamental instinctual compulsion behind playing games: learning valuable skills.
Non-interactive entertainment is just a slightly inferior form of it. We watch the situations, decisions, and consequences of various situations, and learn from it.
Politics is one of those skills (although it's a fairly broad skillset overall; social manipulation is only one of many facets.) And of course nobody would be so naive as to believe politics is only valuable in a government setting. There's politics in grade school, for crying out loud!
In good entertainment (games or TV series) the situations focus on the key moments -- the moments of decision and the execution of those decisions. Those are the moments our brains identify as valuable, and give us pleasure for viewing/experiencing.
Other parts our brains find boring. Like if we were forced to actually watch several days of desert travel in Game of Thrones as Daenerys travels with the Dothraki. If we were forced to watch/read about that entire uneventful sequence, we'd quickly grow bored because our brains would rightly identify it as being very low in value (in terms of increasing the skills associated with surviving in her particular, bizarre, situation.)
A political videogame can be plenty of fun then, by fast-forwarding through the nonsense and focusing on the key moments of decision, so players can learn what works and what doesn't. Obviously it's that much better if it manages to accurately model the real sorts of decisions and consequences involved, but even a loose simulation is going to be much denser learning than the player would otherwise get.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"Encouraging player politics is surprisingly easy. Look at World of Tanks: Add a clanwars map and give rewards to those who have managed to claim and hold area. Instant politics. Drama too, sadly." - Quirhid
I'm not too familair with that system. Can you link to an article or forum thread on the politics behind that.
Sadly, no. I only talk from experience since I was somewhat involved. There were powerblocks or alliances, all sorst of deals from non-aggression pacts, mercenaries to defense agreements and how the gold (cash shop currency in WoT) is distributed amongst the clans that worked to gether.
That's the stuff I was curious about. Thanks!
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Basically it sounds like you want game politics to be as unlike real politics as possible. The truth is that politics are not interesting. But in entertainment we take out actual politics and put in a fake juiced up version. If you told the story of a real high school student's 4 years it would be boring as fuck. Yet high school drama shows and sit coms are super popular. Because they only show the good parts.
The problem you have is that in narrative entertainment the politics matter to the people involved because the director said so. Whereas in politics in a video game the politics can't just be assigned value they have to actually mean something to players. And they don't mean anything if you don't work for them. The boring stuff gives meaning to the fun parts.
And also in real politics there are winners and losers. In GoT or in Gossip Girl the losers aren't real. They have minimal characterization and they are being PERFORMED by actors. In a video game the losers have to be REAL. Played by players. After all they have to convince the winners that they actually won something. Again in narrative media you can just have the characters SAY that that is was hard and intense to win.
So to summarize:
In order for some people to win, some people have to lose. After all that's what drives your precious MOBAs and other "competitive" multiplayer shit you guys like. Winners and Losers. Half the player base of all those games is constantly losing over and over again.
Politics are plenty interesting.
We (mankind) create games about every skill which has perceived value. That's the fundamental instinctual compulsion behind playing games: learning valuable skills.
Non-interactive entertainment is just a slightly inferior form of it. We watch the situations, decisions, and consequences of various situations, and learn from it.
Politics is one of those skills (although it's a fairly broad skillset overall; social manipulation is only one of many facets.) And of course nobody would be so naive as to believe politics is only valuable in a government setting. There's politics in grade school, for crying out loud!
In good entertainment (games or TV series) the situations focus on the key moments -- the moments of decision and the execution of those decisions. Those are the moments our brains identify as valuable, and give us pleasure for viewing/experiencing.
Other parts our brains find boring. Like if we were forced to actually watch several days of desert travel in Game of Thrones as Daenerys travels with the Dothraki. If we were forced to watch/read about that entire uneventful sequence, we'd quickly grow bored because our brains would rightly identify it as being very low in value (in terms of increasing the skills associated with surviving in her particular, bizarre, situation.)
A political videogame can be plenty of fun then, by fast-forwarding through the nonsense and focusing on the key moments of decision, so players can learn what works and what doesn't. Obviously it's that much better if it manages to accurately model the real sorts of decisions and consequences involved, but even a loose simulation is going to be much denser learning than the player would otherwise get.
So basically you wrote a giant post just to say you agree with me? But you are wrong. They don't focus on the key moments. They focus on the results. When all of the actual work comes together. For the most part the results were decided well before the moments we see on the TV. The important parts happen in the mind and you can't really show that well on TV. They stack it full of council meetings to try and put that in but its just a patch. A sad substitute for the truth. Or that scene in GoT where Littlefinger monologues in front of the hookers.
And the same goes for most other decisions. The games you play, full of interesting decisions, are not the ones that prepare you and teach you skills. Do you really think something that prepared you for real life would be that much fun? Assuming you find that watered down garbage fun.
The fact that you think that something like Starcraft would make you better if you were in the situation of commanding an army embarrasses me as a fellow human being. Or that LoL would teach you anything about anything useful. There is literally nothing in WoW that can teach you valuable skills. Now EvE can train you in important skills. Or various games by NorbSoftDev.
Your "interesting" games are the OPPOSITE of useful skill development.
So basically you wrote a giant post just to say you agree with me? But you are wrong. They don't focus on the key moments. They focus on the results. When all of the actual work comes together. For the most part the results were decided well before the moments we see on the TV. The important parts happen in the mind and you can't really show that well on TV. They stack it full of council meetings to try and put that in but its just a patch. A sad substitute for the truth. Or that scene in GoT where Littlefinger monologues in front of the hookers.
And the same goes for most other decisions. The games you play, full of interesting decisions, are not the ones that prepare you and teach you skills. Do you really think something that prepared you for real life would be that much fun? Assuming you find that watered down garbage fun.
The fact that you think that something like Starcraft would make you better if you were in the situation of commanding an army embarrasses me as a fellow human being. Or that LoL would teach you anything about anything useful. There is literally nothing in WoW that can teach you valuable skills. Now EvE can train you in important skills. Or various games by NorbSoftDev.
Your "interesting" games are the OPPOSITE of useful skill development.
You act like organizational skills, problem solving, consistency, decision making speed, social skills, tactics, strategy, self reliance, planning etc are not all important skills. All of those can be learned and honed through gaming to a certain extent. Different games are better at teaching these skills than others, but certainly WoW involves using a lot of these skills. EVE does as well.
It just looks like you took games you like, said they were worthwhile and taught you something, then took games you don't like and said they taught nothing. That's a really, really shortsighted view of what's happening.
I don't know if this is too personal a question, but what are you playing right now Axehilt? Your perspective seems to come from some kind of a design background and your comments have made me curious.
So basically you wrote a giant post just to say you agree with me? But you are wrong. They don't focus on the key moments. They focus on the results. When all of the actual work comes together. For the most part the results were decided well before the moments we see on the TV. The important parts happen in the mind and you can't really show that well on TV. They stack it full of council meetings to try and put that in but its just a patch. A sad substitute for the truth. Or that scene in GoT where Littlefinger monologues in front of the hookers.
And the same goes for most other decisions. The games you play, full of interesting decisions, are not the ones that prepare you and teach you skills. Do you really think something that prepared you for real life would be that much fun? Assuming you find that watered down garbage fun.
The fact that you think that something like Starcraft would make you better if you were in the situation of commanding an army embarrasses me as a fellow human being. Or that LoL would teach you anything about anything useful. There is literally nothing in WoW that can teach you valuable skills. Now EvE can train you in important skills. Or various games by NorbSoftDev.
Your "interesting" games are the OPPOSITE of useful skill development.
You said politics weren't interesting. But they are. Even against NPCs, you still have all of those situations, decisions, and consequences that cause it to be. It's fun even when it isn't real (probably more fun due to lack of an automatic loser.)
They do focus on the key moments. The result implies the decision. When Rob Stark is betrayed, we see the consequence and we can infer the decision was made sometime prior (because obviously the consequence is happening.)
As for life skills, you're either not perceptive enough to notice or purposefully feigning ignorance for the sake of argument (particularly with the moronic Starcraft comment), but here goes anyway...
Games teach general min-maxing strategies for things like economies and finance (auction houses and resource management). Guild leaders have often cited guild management as being very similar to real-world management (because it is), and many of the same skills apply: basic social skills, being diplomatic, interviewing candidates for a job, and dealing with poor performers. General organization strategies are also rewarded, as well as developing the capacity for long-term planning.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
We had politics back in the MUD/MUSH days. We had permadeath too.
Politics and permadeath could work in the MUD/MUSH days because they weren't "combat games" like the games we have today. They were primarily social games where people played roles, like minor functionaries and foot soldiers. The "action" was in the dialogue we gave to each other, it wasn't in cleaning out MOBs and bosses for phat lewts. We did have a combat system in those old social environments, but it was text-based, highly narrative, decisive and deadly. You didn't engage in combat trivially.
Fighting was a last resort in those games, not a first response. The biggest challenge I see with fostering politics in an MMO is that people are too quick to fight...as to be expected in games designed to feature combat as the central activity. Because combat is not a political act; it is the thing you do when politics breaks down. And seeing how the vast majority of people attracted to these games are in it for the combat, I don't see why they would want to waste time building relationships, forging conspiracies or engaging in diplomacy.
Now I've been in MMORPGs with a lot of political intrigue. But the intrigue was always as a result of strict, roleplay-centric groups who practiced strict IC discipline. Regrettably, this is beyond the desire of most players I know.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
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Exactly. You give them the tools to enforce their rules and seize control, and let them decide within their own potlitical and strategic mechanations how they wish to go about that. This allows those that want to take the reigns to do so, those that want to rally behind a flag to do so, and those who want to stay uninvolved to, well, just like real life live under whatever rules are set forth by their local governing body.
"Encouraging player politics is surprisingly easy. Look at World of Tanks: Add a clanwars map and give rewards to those who have managed to claim and hold area. Instant politics. Drama too, sadly." - Quirhid
I'm not too familair with that system. Can you link to an article or forum thread on the politics behind that.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
"Actually, the supply & demand is really controlled by CCP. They control the drop rate of items and therefore control the inflation."
You are confusing control with regulation. The distinction lies in that the players control the fluctuation and CCP regulates how far to each end it is allowed to drift. Player control is also far more dynamic and immediately reactionary (at an almost transaction level basis), whereas the regulation is actually few and far between (expansion and patch updates, when and if deemed necessary). To give an example, players control the cost of Tritanium. If something happened that the cost of tritanium started going through the roof, the devs would assess if it is natural market or otherwise. If it is natural free market fluctuation, they would leave it be unless it reached some truly insane proportion.
"In fact, I would go as far to say that large alliances such as the goons, power is based more on notoriaty than any real political or financial power."
It's a safe bet that every miner and industrialist that has either lost assets or made bank as a result of Hulkageddon or Burn Jita would disagree with that statement. I'd venture to say that a lot of pet corps and moon miners would disagree, as well.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Sadly, no. I only talk from experience since I was somewhat involved. There were powerblocks or alliances, all sorst of deals from non-aggression pacts, mercenaries to defense agreements and how the gold (cash shop currency in WoT) is distributed amongst the clans that worked to gether.
Here's a link to explain the system: http://worldoftanks.eu/en/clanwars_guide/introduction
In a nutshell: Clans battle over the areas in a series of instanced battles. They move around pieces that represent tanks on the browser-based out-of-the-game map board. They capture an area, the clan gets a fixed gold amount every hour. Some areas are more valuable than others. The map is also divided into timezones half hour wide and every night, from right to left, the battles in the map board are resolved. This works sort of like an invitational match ingame. The timezones create this wonky metagame that it is better for the clans to spread east-west direction rather than north-south to avoid battles being overlapped within the same half-hour.
New clans enter the board from special "landing sites" where there's essentially a mini tournament every night with the winner is pitted against the current owner. If they manage to land i.e. capture the landing site, they are recommended to move their pieces on an adjecent area, to attack, in order to not have to defend their area in the tournament finals. Established clans spawn more pieces from headquarters which they can build on an area they choose. It is not recommended to build an HQ on a landing site since it will be under attack every night.
There was some talk about building infrastructure and adding espionage on the map, but I burned out of WoT long before they implemented anything.
TL;DR: Risk type world map where battles are resolved in instanced matches.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Games like this already exsist where player politic matter, the problem is that most people find that the AAA companies are playing it safe and making the same game reskinned over and over again. I suggest you check out darkfall unholy wars it may not be as polished as games u expect since most people dont play thing other than AAA develeoped game however it offers everything you said above.
I always expected to see this in MMORPG's when I first started playing them many years ago, but instead I got dissapointed by instances, raids and battlegrounds. It seems now though that MMORPG's are shifting to this, would be awesome if we could see the stuff that Shadowbane had again.
As others have mentioned, unformalized politics and drama is surprisingly easy to implement.
But I wouldn't mind seeing a formalized system of politics created in a game, where you interact with NPCs who have agendas that can be spied or implied, and favor to be curried. You could make a real game of it.
Game of Thrones is entertaining because it hops to all the interesting political events and skips the trivial ones. So unlike "real" videogame politics where I'm sure you could spend thousands (if not tens of thousands) of hours in EVE between major political events, Game of Thrones is all of the major events stacked end-to-end. That's what makes it good entertainment.
A politics videogame which formalizes politics via game systems would be similar. Every session you'd have a major political event(s). It would be rich, dense politics, and make for good entertainment.
There are a good number of political simulators out there, but one that sticks out in my mind as a good system was from Europa 1400 The Guild where most of the game is about running a business (carpentry, blacksmithing, etc) in the year 1400, but there's also a significant political system. You compete against other businessmen to be favored with the guild, and if your perfume manufacturer opponent is pulling ahead you can do things like make perfume illegal to trip them up. It just requires earning enough political clout to be able to even propose the measure in the first place, and then having enough government members fond of you to see it pass.
Then again, you might forgo the favor-currying and just hire an assassination on the guy (but there's a certain amount of risk associated with that.) The economy simulation isn't the funnest I've ever played but the overall game was quite a unique experience that I recommend if all of that sounds interesting to you. The most frustrating part was sometimes the game was inexplicably obtuse, so you'd have some simple goal in mind (improve favor with Joe Butcher) but no clear paths to achieve that goal, even though in real life it's something you could just walk up and do.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You want to see stuff from a failed game?
I don't think it is just the political events. GoT is good because of the characters and writing. You can create that kind of story lines and events without the best professional writers money can buy.
If you want to truly influence the game world and be involved in politics that actually matter, than check out Origins of Malu. Factions are entirely player created and controlled, cities and towns are player created and controlled (also good for the crafters!), faction territories are player created and controlled. This game has so much promise right now, I just hope it all turns out well!
http://originsmmo.com/?q=factions
http://originsmmo.com/?q=crafting
http://originsmmo.com/?q=features
As far as how to implement? Tera had an addon essentially for politics that didn't really effect those uninterested but I don't think it was that robust. You could intertwine politics into a game that had seperate "kingdoms" that allowed a dev to moderate the framework. This would be the most likely result in a non open PvP game.
Another is to provide a medium like EvE does where the politics just happen. This IMO is the easiest way to provide politics but I wouldn't prefer it.
Well it tends to be mostly political events, but whether they're political or not isn't actually important.
What's important is they skip hundreds of hours of people uneventfully walking across a desert. That's not included in the book nor the series, nor should it be included in a MMORPG game trying to mimick the IP's success.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Not only that .. the other important point is that good professional writers are creating those events that are interesting, and fit to the characters. I care very little about some guy got his head chopped off, but i care a great deal about Ned Stark's head got chopped off, particulary because how he was betrayed.
This kind of interesting stuff will never happen in a million years in a MMO if you let players do whatever.
Er, no, it definitely does happen.
There are a few very major EVE political/economic plots that have happened over the years. And they do make great stories. But they make great stories when condensed down to the eventful moments, just like Game of Thrones is written.
They don't make great stories when experienced first-hand as a game. Behind every fantastic EVE story is literally hundreds of thousands of gameplay hours of mind-numbing boredom.
So don't pretend these types of events never happen. They do happen, they just happen so rarely that the overall game is mind-numbingly boring.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
http://www.ao-universe.com/index.php?id=14&site=AO-Universe%2FKnowledge%2F&mid=&pid=87
land control,alliances,open world pvp,politics,spys,etc ,all there and its brilliant.
So, did ESO have a successful launch? Yes, yes it did.By Ryan Getchell on April 02, 2014.
**On the radar: http://www.cyberpunk.net/ **
And also, much of it is propaganda - fiction. There's a whole lot of bullshit flying around for whatever reason. Really you can be only sure what happened if you were there.
Goons in particular are quite the story-tellers.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Basically it sounds like you want game politics to be as unlike real politics as possible. The truth is that politics are not interesting. But in entertainment we take out actual politics and put in a fake juiced up version. If you told the story of a real high school student's 4 years it would be boring as fuck. Yet high school drama shows and sit coms are super popular. Because they only show the good parts.
The problem you have is that in narrative entertainment the politics matter to the people involved because the director said so. Whereas in politics in a video game the politics can't just be assigned value they have to actually mean something to players. And they don't mean anything if you don't work for them. The boring stuff gives meaning to the fun parts.
And also in real politics there are winners and losers. In GoT or in Gossip Girl the losers aren't real. They have minimal characterization and they are being PERFORMED by actors. In a video game the losers have to be REAL. Played by players. After all they have to convince the winners that they actually won something. Again in narrative media you can just have the characters SAY that that is was hard and intense to win.
So to summarize:
In order for some people to win, some people have to lose. After all that's what drives your precious MOBAs and other "competitive" multiplayer shit you guys like. Winners and Losers. Half the player base of all those games is constantly losing over and over again.
My high school experience was anything but boring. Drinking, getting laid, people committing suicide, drugs, fights, sports, girls slapping guys, guys slapping girls, people just losing it in class, teachers yelling at students, students yelling at teachers, sexual harassment, rumors of rape, cheating, expulsions, someone ran over six kids by accident when it was raining (2 survived), fixed student body elections, bullying, parties, betrayal, friendship, hatred, etc.
Drama was the name of the game in high school. I don't know if people just block out the crazy shit that goes on there, but my fairly nice public suburban high school certainly had its fair share of drama.
About the part in red specifically, that's not how ranking systems usually work. What they do is make system where a player wins half the time and loses half the time. They do this by placing you against players of a similar skill level. So if you start winning a lot, you start running into people that are more skilled than you and you get beaten back until you get better. If you start losing a lot, it pushes you back down to people that you will be more competitive with.
So ideally, all of the playerbase except for the top 1% or so are winning and losing at approximately an equal amount if they play enough games.
Politics are plenty interesting.
We (mankind) create games about every skill which has perceived value. That's the fundamental instinctual compulsion behind playing games: learning valuable skills.
Non-interactive entertainment is just a slightly inferior form of it. We watch the situations, decisions, and consequences of various situations, and learn from it.
Politics is one of those skills (although it's a fairly broad skillset overall; social manipulation is only one of many facets.) And of course nobody would be so naive as to believe politics is only valuable in a government setting. There's politics in grade school, for crying out loud!
In good entertainment (games or TV series) the situations focus on the key moments -- the moments of decision and the execution of those decisions. Those are the moments our brains identify as valuable, and give us pleasure for viewing/experiencing.
Other parts our brains find boring. Like if we were forced to actually watch several days of desert travel in Game of Thrones as Daenerys travels with the Dothraki. If we were forced to watch/read about that entire uneventful sequence, we'd quickly grow bored because our brains would rightly identify it as being very low in value (in terms of increasing the skills associated with surviving in her particular, bizarre, situation.)
A political videogame can be plenty of fun then, by fast-forwarding through the nonsense and focusing on the key moments of decision, so players can learn what works and what doesn't. Obviously it's that much better if it manages to accurately model the real sorts of decisions and consequences involved, but even a loose simulation is going to be much denser learning than the player would otherwise get.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
That's the stuff I was curious about. Thanks!
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
So basically you wrote a giant post just to say you agree with me? But you are wrong. They don't focus on the key moments. They focus on the results. When all of the actual work comes together. For the most part the results were decided well before the moments we see on the TV. The important parts happen in the mind and you can't really show that well on TV. They stack it full of council meetings to try and put that in but its just a patch. A sad substitute for the truth. Or that scene in GoT where Littlefinger monologues in front of the hookers.
And the same goes for most other decisions. The games you play, full of interesting decisions, are not the ones that prepare you and teach you skills. Do you really think something that prepared you for real life would be that much fun? Assuming you find that watered down garbage fun.
The fact that you think that something like Starcraft would make you better if you were in the situation of commanding an army embarrasses me as a fellow human being. Or that LoL would teach you anything about anything useful. There is literally nothing in WoW that can teach you valuable skills. Now EvE can train you in important skills. Or various games by NorbSoftDev.
Your "interesting" games are the OPPOSITE of useful skill development.
You act like organizational skills, problem solving, consistency, decision making speed, social skills, tactics, strategy, self reliance, planning etc are not all important skills. All of those can be learned and honed through gaming to a certain extent. Different games are better at teaching these skills than others, but certainly WoW involves using a lot of these skills. EVE does as well.
It just looks like you took games you like, said they were worthwhile and taught you something, then took games you don't like and said they taught nothing. That's a really, really shortsighted view of what's happening.
You said politics weren't interesting. But they are. Even against NPCs, you still have all of those situations, decisions, and consequences that cause it to be. It's fun even when it isn't real (probably more fun due to lack of an automatic loser.)
They do focus on the key moments. The result implies the decision. When Rob Stark is betrayed, we see the consequence and we can infer the decision was made sometime prior (because obviously the consequence is happening.)
As for life skills, you're either not perceptive enough to notice or purposefully feigning ignorance for the sake of argument (particularly with the moronic Starcraft comment), but here goes anyway...
Games teach general min-maxing strategies for things like economies and finance (auction houses and resource management). Guild leaders have often cited guild management as being very similar to real-world management (because it is), and many of the same skills apply: basic social skills, being diplomatic, interviewing candidates for a job, and dealing with poor performers. General organization strategies are also rewarded, as well as developing the capacity for long-term planning.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
We had politics back in the MUD/MUSH days. We had permadeath too.
Politics and permadeath could work in the MUD/MUSH days because they weren't "combat games" like the games we have today. They were primarily social games where people played roles, like minor functionaries and foot soldiers. The "action" was in the dialogue we gave to each other, it wasn't in cleaning out MOBs and bosses for phat lewts. We did have a combat system in those old social environments, but it was text-based, highly narrative, decisive and deadly. You didn't engage in combat trivially.
Fighting was a last resort in those games, not a first response. The biggest challenge I see with fostering politics in an MMO is that people are too quick to fight...as to be expected in games designed to feature combat as the central activity. Because combat is not a political act; it is the thing you do when politics breaks down. And seeing how the vast majority of people attracted to these games are in it for the combat, I don't see why they would want to waste time building relationships, forging conspiracies or engaging in diplomacy.
Now I've been in MMORPGs with a lot of political intrigue. But the intrigue was always as a result of strict, roleplay-centric groups who practiced strict IC discipline. Regrettably, this is beyond the desire of most players I know.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE