Expanding the multi-player factor

The MMO aspect seems to be the most dividing and confusing aspect of SotA at the moment. I believe there is room to fine to this aspect to make it work for everyone.

Just to recap, here is the picture I have of how the multiplayer works from the various live chats and interviews I've seen.

The game world will be common to all players, this world serves as the background and setting for your adventures. When playing in multiplayer mode you will essentially be within an instance of the game. The server will populate an instance with a portion of the player base, the system will try to match up the players who are most likely to be friends or share something in common. So rather than have MMO scale interaction we end up on far smaller scale. Something that could be called Small Scale Multiplayer Online instead of massive.

The matching of the players seems to be dynamic and context related. Basically a player can enter a situation where they are at conflict with the world. The server in this case would match the player with other players that would most likely want attack and stop the player from completing their question. This type of behavior can be expanded to far more complex type of situation for players interest in PvP.


Small Scale vs Massive Scale

Each situation has its merits and flaws. I imagine the dev team has put quite a bit of time pondering this issue before deciding on this course of action. I just want to point out some of the positive reasons.

Massive Scale is far more complex, it will require far more processing, prone to synchronization issues and gameplay can be effected by lag.

Massive Scale world balance is difficult to manage. For example players can strip mine resources in a region leading to frustration as everything will be cleared out to a portion of the players base.

Massive Scale will present far more people than players care to see. Think of the bank in Britain in early UO, it was just a massive mess of people yelling.

Small Scale will allow you to focus on a smaller group of players. Everyone now becomes more important is their are not lost in the massive backdrop.

Small Scale has more focus on co-op aspects of adventure. It will guarantee that party of adventurer will now arrive to an empty dungeon.

Small Scale will limit the negative aspect of griefing as no one will be forced to play with someone who insistent on tormenting others.

Small Scale will tone the down the competitive aspect of a massive world and would make casual play as rewarding as hardcore play.


Overall the change in how multiplayer works seems to be an attempt to keep the benefits of mass online interaction while removing the negative aspects that came along with it. While the concept might seem really disappointing at first it might not be so bad once you try it in practice.

Small Scale Multiplayer has been pretty active in the wild. For the last decade people have been creating and running private UO shards. The majority of these worlds were small scale and would hold an average total playerbase of 50 players. With primetime play times having 10 to 20 players online. Surprisingly these worlds offered an incredible experience. Everyone knew each other and there was a real sense of community. Once you got used to the small scale aspect it became preferable instead of massive which now looked more messy than anything.

If you look back massive environment of UO, what did most people do? They ended up joining a sub set of players, most commonly seen as guilds. So despite being a massive world people would hang out with the same set of people. Other people formed player towns to attract people of like mind, Paxlair at its height was an incredible experience. It was something that was small scale 100 or so players and only a fraction of that online and it worked great.

So the experimental data out there shows its not totally a bad idea. In fact the concept has a lot ways it can be expanded. Here are some things that could be done :

<strong>Player Created Persistent Instances </strong> : Give players to create a persistence instance that other players can join. Either public or private with various moderation options. Think G+ communities for example.

For example player from UO Paxlair start playing and they would want to play with others who played on Paxlair. These people may not have shared contact info so the ad-hoc system may not match them. Someone could setup the paxlair community and others would be able to join it. This community would be able to share the game instance together.

Knowing how tight nit player shard communities are, this option would be extreme popular for pre-exisiting groups of players and guilds.

<strong>Temporary Joinable Instances </strong> : Another variation of a specific instance a player can join would be one that is temporary and for a specific purpose. For example a guild war, or some larger scale conflict. Players can join this instance knowing that PvP is expected. Or a player who'd normally be a target can pass it up as their are in the mood for simple adventuring instead.

Ideally a player would have choice of which instances are active, they could join several of these communities but ultimately the player chooses when to access them.

Instances based on theme, communities or special events is just the thing that will remedy some of the aspects of mmo that would be missing on the small scale. It would certainly allow players to meet each other where they would have never met via the ad-hoc system. It will also allow people to find old friends they played with in some previous mmo.

The rest comes down to the technical limitations, number of players per instance and so on. One way to manage load is to have several instances running of a pre-defined community instance to reduce load.

Anyways some food for thought on the topic of multiplayer in SotA.

 

Long post Francis, but very well said. Thank you.

I believe that the way the instancing seems to work (as described) will allow for a game experience that cuts away a lot of the clutter that can break immersion in open world MMOs.