The zombie apocalypse has come to the city of Malton, and right now ~40000 players are waging war against each other to end it, one way or the other. Here, let me give you the quick rundown of the free browser-based game.

Players accrue one action point(AP) every half hour, capping at 50. Survivors use these points to move across the city, search for items, attack zombies, and barricade buildings. Zombies attack barricades, smash buildings, and attack survivors. Seems simple enough, doesn’t it? It’s all done with a web interface an minimal graphics (though there is a Firefox graphical addon.) Different actions cost varying amounts of AP, and when you run out you collapse, so it’s important to make sure you always have enough to get back inside a building.

You level up every 100xp, and then turn around and use those points as currency to buy abilities, human or zombie.

Guilds, you ask? Well, groups are completely unnecessary for a casual player, but for me they play a large role in UD and that’s what I’m loving about it the most. I’m playing with a group of people who all jumped in at once and are starting to get pretty organized. Over a hundred members of a forum I frequent jumped in at once as Survivors, and some of the scarier zombie groups took notice and wished us luck, so that really makes the chest swell with pride. (Also, it worries us that we’ll be targeted and made an example of, while we’re still all at low levels.) We’ve made our forums password-protected to keep spies at bay, and closed admissions to ‘unknown persons’, but things are shaping up nicely.

Yes, there are spies out there, and that’s why the players are truly the highlight of this game. Aside from the gang at Evil Avatar that I’ve joined, there’s the Channel 4 News Team to consider. I mean, Ron Burgundy isn’t going to take a zombie apocalypse lying down. Hell, he wouldn’t even take the regular apocalypse lying down, unless he were on horse tranquilizers. Also, you’ve got the Drama Club showing us all what true professionals they are, keeping the classics alive in the face of undeath.

Urban Dead isn’t exactly passive gaming, as it requires about five minutes (tops) of interaction on the part of the player, but keeping coordinated with your group and planning that move can easily take half an hour if you’re serious about it. If you can spare the time, I highly recommend joining up with pals (or mine, or another group,) and help take back Malton!

Stylistically speaking, clothes in WoW are completely unimportant. Now sure, they have to fit in with the rest of the game (though, that’s a pretty low bar) and you’ll always have people talking about how kickass Set A looks on Race 2, or how Set B’s helmet looks better than Set A’s does… But given the choice, nearly all players choose the same gear; that with higher stats. Players make logical choices based on what they’ll need and simple numbers dictate the outcome. If a MMO’s world is ever going to be important, then player involvement in world status matters, and a large part of that is the visual style. I think one way to encourage players to get a sense of style, and self, is to handle gear closer to how Oblivion does it, than WoW.

In Oblivion the amount of damage a weapon does or defense armor provides is given a rating, from one to ~twenty. That’s it. I think encouraging players to go after gear that goes closer to their personal taste makes the players care about their avatars because of their representation of self rather than the amount of time put into creation (though that could certainly still apply.) Oblivion has enchantments and weapons can be made stronger with them, but that’s largely negligible (or should be toned down in a shared world.)

Essentially, I’d like to shift the onus on gear-fixation from statistical to personal preference. Why? Why not? If you’re a player, you get to exhibit personal taste and stay competitive. If you’re a developer, you get to see what your users prefer.

Bonus points: Allow players to create their own gear and submit it for anonymous peer review before passing it on to developers for the final thumbs up.

Next up? Why this isn’t such a bad idea.

FYI, this is part of a series of posts. You’ll be able to read more lame opinions on MMOs here.

I think my major problem with any MMO comes from the size of the population, and how that serves to reduce the flexibility of online worlds. With thousands playing on a server, one can’t reasonably expect unique quests or items, available only to one person. The other thousands of players would feel cheated because the odds are horribly against _them_ getting the item or triggering a rare event. Maybe Neverwinter Rights modders have it right, and it’s not reasonable to run small-server MMOs and make a profit. Maybe that will forever remain the realm of hobbyists… But damn it, there’s only one Excalibur, and that should be the rule on every server. And getting that sword should be something special for the player, and the server. A player getting an item like that isn’t a problem if I know him, or one of his friends (I’m jealous, but happy for him.) It becomes a problem when I, the player, begins to believe I’ll never be able to achieve something on a world-scale. In most MMOs there are just too many people for anyone to have an influence, so, we need a massive multiplayer massacre. I’m no psychoanalyst, but I’m going to toss the number “less than three hundred” out there as the number of players I want on a server. I had a few additional paragraphs explaining why (crazy talk, including the Monkey Sphere and Kevin Bacon,) and how it would cost more (hence the Visa joke at the top,) but it’s best summed up as “because this is my blog and I say so.”

But I want fewer players, because I want a more flexible world. A world can’t be all things to all people, so I want it to be ‘more’ to ‘fewer’. When playing WoW I can’t get the feeling that I’m special because I’m always just one of dozens of heroes running around trying to kill the same dungeon boss. And I have no interest in the rat race of getting the latest and greatest gear; but I want gear that “I” have, and not everyone else. I need to be able to do something that only “I” did. If I kill an ogre, then he should be dead. But if you have thousands of players, then the ogre dies and most people never even _hear_ about it. So what’s needed is a larger variety of weapon appearances, that have the same effect, and fewer players to have repeat weapons/armor.

Obviously even with smaller populations you’ll have some players that become ‘dungeon runners’/'treasure hunters’ that grab all the same stuff and try to bleed the resources dry, so you’ll need a way to account for those guys. That’s fine, we can fit in some mechanic to cripple grinding like other MMOs have. Make higher players have a smaller chance of getting amazing gear if they plunder every day. If they wait a few days, then their chances rise. Besides, most caves have nothing but nests of bad guys that slowly repopulate in reasonable numbers only if left undisturbed… None of that instant repop stuff. The point is to encourage the player to focus on other things. In fact, here’s a good time to point out MMOs need other things. Not to diminish the importance of raiding, but to refocus the onus so that it’s not squarely on all raiding all the time. Build other games systems with worthy rewards. Aside from encouraging PVP and revenge (a later post,) there’s player pit fighting, player races, gambling, gambling on fighting/races/other-games, resource gathering, running businesses, fishing, smithing, farming/planting, building, and even the arts, that can all be built into pivotal roles of a fantasy MMO easily (contextually speaking.) Hell, smithing, fishing, farming and the likes can all be done into simple mini-games that can determine the outcome. Players don’t need skill levels when the game requires an actual skill. (I tried to find a post Jeff Freeman made about sex in MMOs, but couldn’t find it. You out there, Not-Me Freeman?)

What’s needed is a world that can fuction interestingly without players at all. (When playing Oblivion, despite the conversation trees not being deep, I easily saw NPCs as ‘the world’ and myself as ’something outside of it, affecting it’.) In WoW, there is no affecting the world. No matter how big you are, players are the only worthwhile fish (no matter how big/little) in an ocean. Sure, a lot of that was poor writing, but there’s also the fact that even NPCs don’t function in the gameworld. They only exist to cater to players. I need a world where, after killing an NPC (enemy or comrade,) they die (players too, but that’s also another post.) Point being that dead people should stay dead (unless a player is able to revive them.)

Through player action (the killing (or not,) of major NPCs/players, item capture/retrieval/use, and other such single-player RPG mainstays,) the MMO-world’s character-driven narrative should progress to an eventual end of the given story arc within a matter of months, no longer than a year. The idea of regularly running through instances to kill an enemy every week bores me to no end. Playing WoW, if you charge the enemy and kill their king, he should die. The next in line should ascend. Players who are bad guys wipe out a town of NPCs? Tough. There should be no instant-repopulation an hour later. Maybe have a boat of immigrants arriving on the continent once a week and have those people replace the dead NPCs (or every time a new player signs up, they get off the boat and bring NPCs with them.) If a player kills a giant and drags its helmet into the town square and tosses it on a statue, it should stay there until someone destroys it or knocks it down. I want enterprising players to be able to buy printing presses, and make in-game newspapers, using them to slander other guilds and competing businesses. I want them to buy stores, existing homes, and on rare occassion, build where they want. Hell, have public offices where the player-elected mayor decides if players can legally draw weapons in city-limits. If a player wants to open a bakery, and occasionally toss a poison pie in amongst the rest, detectable to only the well-trained nose, because they think everyone should have such skills? Rock on, you kooky CSI addict. And if a group of players wants to help bring an end to the world, doing the bidding of the bad guy in the game… It’s up to everyone else to stop them.

That’s all I want. A smaller world, a smaller population, with narrative events that are affected by players. Is that too much to ask? Eh, probably.

FYI, this is part of a series of posts. You’ll be able to read more lame opinions on MMOs here.

Note: All comparisons to WoW and Oblivion in the posts will just be for general reference. I’m not a fan of WoW, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. That just means I don’t like it. Conversely, I did like Oblivion…

I’ve written up a list of most of the reasons. My posts will very likely be from this group:

-Massacring MMOs (Or: Born in the M.M.O.)
-Hoofin’ It (Or: “Why the hell does this road go between two deserts; one plagued with mutant rats, and the other with marauders guarding a giant chest of gold, yet they can’t afford good weaponry?” “Will you just stop and ask for directions?” “No! I’m not lost! This road is just fucking stupid!”)
-Sweet Memories (Or: Remember that spot where we first kissed? Yeah, me neither.)
-Mission-ery Positions (Or: Mindless repetition.)
-The Clothes Should Make the Man (Or: Nice suit, everyone.)
-Grinding For Items (Or: No. Just no.)
-PVP (Or: Gimme PVP, or I’ll punch you in the face.)
-Say Something (Or: Can you hear me now? Why the fuck not?)
-One Man’s Journey (Or: How I never saved the world, despite constantly doing just that.)
-Deadly, Deadly Death (Or: This won’t hurt a bit.)
-The End (Or: Well-time orgasmic big bang, or drawn-out dribbling little whimper? Publishers, I know which one you’ll pick!)

I felt really bad when I watched it. The first time. As I watched it a few more times that old aspect of extremely dark humor reared its head a bit. The concept of ‘attacking a funeral’ is so ludicrous that it does seem funny to me. In my minds eye I can see a grieving family standing over a casket just before Cardinal Ximinez jumps into frame shouting “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” But my imagination run amok doesn’t doesn’t change the fact that a real person died and was being remembered here. I’ve no problem admitting a certain level of assholism myself; as I just admitted to, on some level, being entertained by a slaughter at a funeral. But I’m wondering what level of assholism one should regard the attacking Alliance party as. I mean, they were just playing the game, right? In a ‘roleplaying’ way of thinking they saw easy pickings and took it. It’s that “Hitler was a great speaker” way of thinking that forces you to realize that they had a great plan and executed it well. As someone else said, just like the real world doesn’t stop for death, neither does the virtual world.

But at the same time they knew what was going on and targeted the funeral explicitly. Obviously one can’t condone their actions. They used a real world tragedy to their advantage in a video game, slighting others in the process in a manner that’s morally reprehensible. I’d go so far as to say that they deserve a nice solid punch in the face. But they didn’t break any rules, so I can’t see taking any action against them as I’ve seen suggested. This is something that I’d love to hear others take on.