Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

eldergame.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 36 posts

Re: Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

#21

Post by Retric »

anigbrowl wrote: post #12
greendestiny wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its the scope of MMO's thats the problem. Building a massive game world, with massive networking requirements is very hard.

http://www.stackless.com/ stackless python See in particular the articles about Eve, who co-developed this to produce a non-sharded world (in other words, one that isn't split into virtualized incidences walling players in different 'dungeons' away from each other). Eve can get away with fudging some of these problems to an extent because it takes place in space and so travel is achieved by use of things like warp ga…

Having played EVE I would suggest they use shard more than most games, they just let you move from one shard to another. They might call them star systems and let people move between them. And they don't repeat exactly from shard to shard, but that just means the world is filled with the same random quests given out by different NPC's. The point of shards is to limit the number of people in each area and they don't let 5,000 players into the same zone at the same time.

You could do the same thing with a classic MMO by having limited resources in a zone that respawn in real time. It actually a reasonable idea, kill all the gnoll's in that dungeon and they don't respawn. However, it's more fun to for most people to be able to repeat the same dungeon over and over with little effort. You could do the same thing with quick movement between zones but then you get the empty feeling when there are not enough players to fill the world.

It just works better in space, however, awsome random content generation could do the same thing on land.

PS: As to the market's being linked, City of Heroes does the same thing; all shards share the same market.

Re: Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

#22

Post by req2 »

pmjordan wrote: post #16
stcredzero wrote: post #7

Seems like there's plenty of room in the MMO industry, if most of them are this bad. Is there some sort of pathological psychology that's involved with wanting to make your own little world that works for bad group dynamics in MMO dev teams?

Thankfully I've never worked on an MMO, but "AAA" console games are bad enough. My take on the issue is similar to that in the article: management sucks. These are usually well-meaning people, but as they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. As far as I can tell there's a vicious cycle going on in the game industry: they won't hire people who don't love games and aren't in it because they are super-pas…

The noteworthy example of a non-gamer hire is Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard. I've never seen any positive gamer news covering him because of his desire to beat franchises to death with yearly updates.

(As much as gamers claim to despise franchises and sequelmania, it's all the market seems to want.)

Re: Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

#23

Post by pmjordan »

req2 wrote: post #22
pmjordan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully I've never worked on an MMO, but "AAA" console games are bad enough. My take on the issue is similar to that in the article: management sucks. These are usually well-meaning people, but as they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. As far as I can tell there's a vicious cycle going on in the game industry: they won't hire people who don't love games and aren't in it because they are super-pas…

The noteworthy example of a non-gamer hire is Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard. I've never seen any positive gamer news covering him because of his desire to beat franchises to death with yearly updates. (As much as gamers claim to despise franchises and sequelmania, it's all the market seems to want.)

I think non-gamer people are a lot more common on the publisher side. Which maybe explains how publishers get away with the massive power imbalance compared to developers. I've never worked for a publisher, just pure development studios, so I can't really comment.

Re: Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

#24

Post by trickjarrett »

Retric wrote: post #21
anigbrowl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.stackless.com/ stackless python See in particular the articles about Eve, who co-developed this to produce a non-sharded world (in other words, one that isn't split into virtualized incidences walling players in different 'dungeons' away from each other). Eve can get away with fudging some of these problems to an extent because it takes place in space and so travel is achieved by use of things like warp ga…

Having played EVE I would suggest they use shard more than most games, they just let you move from one shard to another. They might call them star systems and let people move between them. And they don't repeat exactly from shard to shard, but that just means the world is filled with the same random quests given out by different NPC's. The point of shards is to limit the number of people in each area and they don't l…

It does feel like shards because of the gates and the relative similarity between galaxies but the fact is that if every inhabitant of the game were to move towards the center they would all eventually converge (assuming the system handled it,) something not possible in true shards.

Re: Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

#25

Post by hoelle »

I'm an MMO hacker that's shipped one unsuccessful game and one moderately successful game, and I have to comment on some points made in this article.

-MMOs fail due to bad management, design

Partially true. All the elements need to be there, and bad technology seems to be the biggest crippling force in games. We need more good hackers in the field.

-Good MMO studios aren't hiring.

Not true, even today.

-MMO studios all have terrible quality of life, pay, benefits.

Not true. Startup studios might, but if you're going into that situation you're either getting profit sharing, or a beginner getting a foot in the door.

-MMO engines don't exist, tech isn't reused.

This is becoming less true, but the third party tech out there is still untested. It's unlikely a great MMO company will sell its tech like Epic does with Unreal, since we need long term customers, and can't afford to undercut ourselves.

-Don't work in games unless you are a gaming fanatic.

Loving gameplay helps if you want to be a gameplay coder, but MMOs are vast. Networking, graphics, AI, scalability, the problems to be solved are endless. If you're bored at your job, I recommend giving the games industry a look.

Re: Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

#26

Post by Retric »

trickjarrett wrote: post #24
Retric wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having played EVE I would suggest they use shard more than most games, they just let you move from one shard to another. They might call them star systems and let people move between them. And they don't repeat exactly from shard to shard, but that just means the world is filled with the same random quests given out by different NPC's. The point of shards is to limit the number of people in each area and they don't l…

It does feel like shards because of the gates and the relative similarity between galaxies but the fact is that if every inhabitant of the game were to move towards the center they would all eventually converge (assuming the system handled it,) something not possible in true shards.

The game engine still fails if to many people gather in the same area. The game design and zone limts artifically avoid this, but it has nothing to do with stackless python.

What I should have said is each zone runs on a seperate physical server (or part of one) and their innovation is to build a game that let's move across HW systms with little issue.

Note: They use a shared database for some game states, but they don't let any CPU read memory from any other CPU directly. It's a question of system archtecture not language features.

Stackless pyton is usefull for other things.

Re: Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

#27

Post by raganwald »

blader wrote: post #15

Most companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people." I'm guessing it's especially true in software - everybody is involved in software nowadays but you can count the number of companies doing software really well on two hands and two feet.

Sturgeon's Revelation?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Re: Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

#28

Post by sethg »

I wonder if the "secure distributed persistent communication" protocol developed by the E folks could be used to implement a virtual world running on a network of clients. I.e., one central server would send a client some model of a room, and the trust layer would prevent that client from moving walls around. (I'm being handwavey here because I'm not familiar with either E or MMOs, but maybe someone else can be inspired by this.)

http://www.erights.org/

Re: Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

#29

Post by philwelch »

pmjordan wrote: post #16
stcredzero wrote: post #7

Seems like there's plenty of room in the MMO industry, if most of them are this bad. Is there some sort of pathological psychology that's involved with wanting to make your own little world that works for bad group dynamics in MMO dev teams?

Thankfully I've never worked on an MMO, but "AAA" console games are bad enough. My take on the issue is similar to that in the article: management sucks. These are usually well-meaning people, but as they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. As far as I can tell there's a vicious cycle going on in the game industry: they won't hire people who don't love games and aren't in it because they are super-pas…

"As far as I can tell there's a vicious cycle going on in the game industry: they won't hire people who don't love games and aren't in it because they are super-passionate about making games."

That's funny. The CS program at my school is filled with people who want to work in the game industry because they love games. I have the same reaction as you--just because playing games is fun doesn't imply making games is fun, and vice versa. Someone might loathe actually playing a game but have a real fun time writing the AI for it.

Re: Most MMO companies are "rudderless ships of doomed people"

#30

Post by csbrooks »

thalur wrote: post #17
ricree wrote: post #4

"There are no MMO engines for sale that can make robust games. They just aren’t any good yet" That's somewhat surprising to me. There's so many MMOs out there that have failed for one reason or another that you'd think someone would be trying to salvage their sunk costs by selling the engine. Despite the competitiveness of the MMO market, there are still a lot of companies trying to break in, so you'd think that ther…

Could a viable company be created with the goal of producing and selling an MMO engine, rather than an actual MMO? You would be removing the expense and risk of creating the gameplay side of things (models, textures, quests etc), and could focus on getting the engine right. There would probably be some issues in selling the engine though: there would be a certain chicken-and-egg factor in selling an unproven engine t…

There are such companies and products.

The fact that the article fails to mention them probably indicates that they aren't worth mentioning, though.

Post reply on HN