Massively multiplayer online role-playing game

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Image:UOPlayerInteraction.jpg A massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is an online computer role-playing game in which a large number of players interact with one another in a virtual world. As in all RPGs, players assume the role of a character (traditionally in a fantasy setting) and take control over most of that character's actions. MMORPGs are distinguished from single-player or small multi-player RPGs by the game's persistent world, usually hosted by the game's publisher, which continues to exist and evolve while the player is away from the game.

MMORPGs are immensely popular, with several commercial games reporting millions of subscribers. South Korea boasts the highest subscription numbers, with millions of users registered with the more popular games; see list of MMORPGs for a list of the most prominent MMORPGs.

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Common Features

Though MMORPGs have evolved considerably, many of them share various characteristics.

  • Traditional Dungeons & Dragons style gameplay, including quests, monsters, and loot.
  • A system for character development, usually involving levels and experience points (commonly abbreviated as Exp or XP)
  • An economy, based on trading of items (such as weapons and armor) and a regular currency.
  • Guilds or clans, which are organizations of players, whether or not the game supports them.
  • Game Moderators (or Game Masters), sometimes-paid individuals in charge of supervising the world.

As most MMORPGs are commercial, like EverQuest and World of Warcraft, players must either purchase the client software for a one-time fee or pay a monthly subscription fee to play. Most major MMORPGs require players do both these things. Some free-of-charge MMORPG-type games do exist, though their production quality is generally lower compared to commercial MMORPGs. By nature, "massively multiplayer" games are online, and require monthly subscriptions due to the needs of the design and development process. With this in mind, the alternate term MMGS, standing for Massively Multiplayer Gaming Service, is now becoming recognized as an improved, more concise name for this genre of games.

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History

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Image:Merge-arrows.gif It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with History of MMORPGs. (Discuss)

MMORPGs, as we define them today, have existed since the early 1990s. However, they have a history that extends back into the late 1970s. Over 25 years ago, players would connect to an entirely text-based world (no graphics) called a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) which was usually hosted at a University, sometimes without the knowledge of the system's administrators. The gameplay and community of these games was similar to the MMORPGs of today.

Companies were formed to produce games on proprietary networks (such as CompuServe), allowing small groups of players access to new games. Then, with the introduction of the Internet, the genre was able to really grow. Games like Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds in South Korea, and EverQuest in the west, garnered huge player bases and thus serious media attention. More companies saw MMORPGs as lucrative opportunities, and today both the phrase "MMORPG" and the production of MMORPGs are commonplace.

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Academic attention

MMORPGs have begun to attract significant academic attention, notably in the fields of economics and psychology. Edward Castronova specializes in the study of virtual worlds (MUDs, MMOGs, and similar concepts). Most of his writings, including "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier" (2001), have examined relationships between real world economies and synthetic economies.

With the growing popularity of the genre, a growing number of psychologists and sociologists study the actions and interactions of the players in such games. One of the most famous of these researchers is Sherry Turkle. Another researcher is Nick Yee who has surveyed more than 35,000 MMORPG players over the past few years, focusing on psychological and sociological aspects of these games. His research can be found at The Daedalus Project.

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Independent development

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Many small teams of programmers and artists have tried to create their own MMORPGs. The average MMORPG project takes three to four years and large investments of money to create. Independent development, or game development not run by any company, usually takes longer due to lack of developer's time, manpower or money. Additionally, the long-term lack of funding required for running MMORPG servers may lead to the abandonment of the project.

Sometimes these independent games are free-to-play, but will confer in-game privileges to paying customers.

Some of the best-established independent projects are AWplanet, Daimonin, Endless Online, Star Wars Combine and Planeshift. Both Daimonin and Planeshift are entirely open source. The developers of Endless Online have also released development information with details about their coding.

The WorldForge project has been active since 1998 and formed a community of independent developers who are working on creating framework for a number of open-source MMORPGs.

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Browser-based MMORPGs

With the success of the MMORPG genre in recent years, several multiplayer games played in web browsers have also begun using the MMORPG moniker. This largely text-based sub-genre developed from old BBS games and pre-dates the modern idea of an MMORPG. Browser-based MMORPGs are usually simpler games than their stand-alone counterparts, typically involving turn-based play and simple strategies (e.g. "build a large army, then attack other players for gold"), though there are many interesting variations on the popular themes to be found. Many of these games are more like turn-based strategy games or wargames than role-playing games. In Planetarion players control planets and fleets of ships; in Kings of Chaos the player commands an army rather than a single player character. In Pardus, the player controls a character who owns a spaceship and gains experience points through trading or fighting, in a way similar to the classic game Elite. In BattleMaster, the game world never "resets", so that some player realms have existed for more than 5 real years while other realms be formed and destroyed by players, virtually giving the game its own developing history as lived and written all by the players.

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One of the earliest examples of a browser-based MMORPG is Archmage, which dates back to early 1999. Currently, a popular browser-based MMORPG, Kings of Chaos, boasts a player population numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Its popularity is primarily fuelled by a reciprocal link clicking system where users give each other more soldiers by clicking on their friends' unique links, taking advantage of the small world phenomenon to spread word of the game across the world. Some examples of click based MMORPG's are Legend of the Green Dragon and World of Phaos, whose code is open source, allowing anyone to create their own game server. Another browser-based MMORPG, Kingdom of Loathing, is entirely satirical. Some of the more popular of these have become profitable through user subscriptions.

Not all browser-based MMORPGs are turn-based text games. More recently, faster computers and the Java programming language have allowed the introduction of graphical browser-based MMORPGs such as RuneScape, produced by Jagex, which are more similar to standalone MMORPGs.

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Genre challenges

Template:Main Most MMORPGs require significant development resources to overcome the logistical hurdles associated with such large production efforts. Online games require virtual worlds, significant hardware requirements (e.g., servers and bandwidth), and dedicated support staff. Despite the efforts of developers cognizant of these issues, reviewers often cite non-optimal populations (such as overcrowding or under-populated worlds), lag, and poor support as problems of games in this genre. These problems tend to be worse for free MMORPGs. Peer-to-peer MMORPGs could theoretically scale better because peers share the resource load, but practical issues such as asymmetrical network bandwidth and CPU-hungry rendering engines make peer to peer MMORPGs a difficult proposition. Additionally, they become vulnerable to other problems such as cheating.

Several MMORPGs have suffered through technical difficulties through the first few days (or weeks) after launch. Early successes such as Ultima Online and EverQuest managed to pass through this stage with little permanent damage. Few games may have significant failures, leading ultimately to their demise, if they launch too early and contain frequent bug fixes, downtime, or structural game changes that may discourage players from continuing to play the game. Due to these problems, games such as Anarchy Online and World War II Online struggled to regain good press after their first month, and gained good press after stabilizing their servers. Dark Age of Camelot and City of Heroes showed hardly any signs of such difficulties.

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Cheating

Template:Main Cheating is a major challenge for the game developers, as it is done in many ways. Exploiting is a form of cheating involving the use of a flaw in the game mechanics to gain unfair advantage. Depending on the nature of the exploit, game developers can fix the exploits within hours or even minutes through patches and updates, although some holes last weeks or months before they are detected or reported. Even when fixed, exploiting can still be an issue, as exploiters may still have the advantage they gained before the patch was released. Depending on the seriousness of the exploit, a rollback may be needed just to counter the effects the exploits had.

Another form of cheating is referred to as "Twinking". Twinking results when players of an MMORPG bypass the spirit of the game design in order to equip their characters with items, skills, or other game concepts that unbalance the game as a whole, and that most players do not have were they to play the game as intended by the developers. While most game companies do not take a public stance on twinking being against the rules, the design of the games makes it clear that it should not occur. The game imbalance twinks create often creates difficult design challenges for a developer over the long run.

External or 3rd party programs are another type of cheat. They can be used to automate legitimate actions that were intended to be accomplished by the users themselves, often with such efficiency that it provides a huge advantage. Botting is a term for a player using a script that could automate progress through the game without them actually playing the game for themselves. This could be done through a simple macro program which records keystrokes and mouse movements, or scripting program that could make “smart” keystrokes, such as AC Tools. Farmers, if they are unable to exploit loop holes in the game, will use such methods to harvest materials or gold from the game world right around the clock.

Requiring a little more talent on the cheaters part, along with some rudimentry social engineering, some third party programs are released with code in them to capture and relay account details back to the author, enabling them to steal virtual possesions from the account or impersonate the rightful owner to perpetrate confidence tricks and other scams. These trojans often masquerade as a free utility to help with some common game related task such as character template design. Even more subtle methods are known to be used to gain an edge, and these require the most skill as they can be hard to detect. Depending on the way the game handles certain aspects of gameplay the client or components thereof can be modified, either on disk, directly in memory or on the wire as data passes between the client and server. All the while the server does not verify the veracity of client data or, ideally, take care of important calculations server-side, this can be used to modify values such as character health or armour, speed up movement or subtly change other non-trivial aspects of the game to the cheater's advantage. There are programs that have been designed to prevent external programs from running during a game, such as GameGuard. The integrity of client files can also be checked each time the game is loaded, although of course some gamers have found ways to bypass or disable these protection programs.

The selling of in-game items for real world currency is also a huge problem for major MMORPG's. Using this method unbalances the game's economy, making the hard-working players of the game not as well off as those who just wish to pay money for an advantage over others. This form of cheating not only unbalances the game's economy, but also gives the lazy a chance to cheat their way into the upper tiers of the system. Another problem is also buying gold from web-sites to get on their character in the game.

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Private servers

Single-client based graphic MMORPGs may have private servers or server emulators. Private servers are mostly run by volunteers, therefore most of them are free. However, some private servers may wish for people to donate money, sometimes in exchange for a bonus in the game. Private servers remain markedly less popular than the official servers, with player numbers in the hundreds, not thousands. EQEmu is a server emulator for EverQuest, others exist for World of Warcraft, Lineage II, Ultima Online, and many other MMORPGs.

In China as well as many other Asian countries the use of private servers is more prevalent. Most Chinese MMORPG players are aware of the existence of private servers, and according to statisticsTemplate:Citation needed more people prefer private servers than official servers. The reasons for this are the relatively high fees for official servers and the availability of 100MB/s fiber optic internet connections, which can be as cheap as US$30 a month. As a result, the costs of running a server in China are remarkably low. In one instance, a private server had more than 50 000 players registered. Some even have 1000 accounts in 1 day (the opening day). Among such cases are Mu Online which is one of the most popular private server games in the world, with thousands of private servers. Private servers have significantly damaged the commercial MMORPG development. Many gamers in China feel the companies that developed MMORPGs purposefully made the leveling progress advance slowly so more money could be made off the gamers. Most of the private servers have placed a faster experience rate, allowing players to progress through the game faster than on retail servers.

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Current Trends in MMORPGs

As the MMORPG market becomes more competitive, innovation in new releases is becoming a necessity; it would be financial suicide to release another simple hack and slash MMORPG, no matter how pretty it looked. So, MMORPGs, as long as they are being produced, will be continuously evolving.

One (arguable) MMORPG trend is "tie-ins" with successful movie licenses. The most recent example of this is The Matrix Online, based on the Matrix trilogy of films; the earliest possibly was Star Wars Galaxies. Though neither of these titles was a great financial success, mainly due to their divergence from the original property and poor gameplay, further tie-in games will very likely still be produced.

The process is also apparently now being applied in reverse, and a MMORPG is being designed to promote a movie.Template:Citation needed

A controversial trend which merits much greater discussion is the trading of real currency for game currency, sometimes supported by the game providers.

One near-future trend could be the introduction of player-created content into the games. In some games, this feature does already exist; for example, Second Life relies heavily on player-created content (such as animations, sound files, and textures). However, these games are very different from the far more popular "standard" MMORPGs revolving around crafting and combat. Player-created content in these games would be in the form of areas to explore, missions to carry out and specific weapons and armor to use. Whether or not this becomes mainstream is anyone's guess.

Also possible in the near future is the widespread introduction of MMOG software engines, which are generic tools that make it much easier for individuals (or small teams) to produce their own MMOGs (including MMORPGs) for profit. Some examples of this kind of engine are Multiverse, Kaneva, and Realm Crafter.

Some predict that a new rush of independent MMOG development, spurred on by these new software engines, will result in successful "mods" for MMORPGs, similar to what has happened with the FPS genre (see Counter-Strike).

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See also

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References

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External links

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