The Ideal Purge Game

[Slamz]

to put it another way: some people are too stupid or too lazy to come up with their own goals, and need others to set goals for them. the question then becomes, "who should set those goals? the game developer or the players?" Blizzard says the developer should do it. CCP says the players should.

I'd say it depends on what you want: a game or a gaming platform.

WOW is a game. WOW is like basketball: clearly defined rules and clearly defined objectives. When 10 people meet up in WOW, they already know what to get together and do. WOW is pug-friendly for this reason. We've never met, but we log in beside each other and head in the same direction because we both know what the objective is.

EVE is a gaming platform. EVE is like a parking lot. Maybe you can play basketball, maybe you can play roller hockey or kickball -- there is very little guidance provided and when 10 people meet up in EVE, the first thing you have to do is spend 30 minutes deciding on what to do. EVE is not very pug-friendly because of this. We log in beside each other and head off in different directions because the game has provided no objective.

Playing devil's advocate. Ok so let's say you create a highly valuable object to fight over. What makes the object highly valuable? It seems like the most valuable objects would be those objects which improve your chances of beating your opponents to the next valuable object. But we don't want those in a game because that leads to the advancement model.

Perhaps a better way to put it is that people need well defined objectives in a game. You log in, maybe look at a map and immediately understand what the next objective is.

This objective could be created by putting value onto particular objects but it can also be created by pure artificial manipulation of the environment, like a lattice.

Both WW2O and Planetside (and maybe WAR) are good examples of why "game" > "sandbox". You give 20,000 people a sandbox and they all spread out and do different things and you don't have much of a game at all. You slap down an artificial structure that direct the flow of gameplay towards battling over specific objectives and now you've got a game.

Let's say you find something that is worth fighting over, doesn't that drive players to organize themselves up to a level at which they are then assured of securing that object over other organizations, either by employing more players or by training their players to employ more complex strategies? How then does a pug have a chance at ever securing that object? The more organized team would have to be absent for the pug to have a chance but then you can't make the object too valuable because how valuable should the object be if you don't have to fight to obtain it?

I think Planetside and WW2O offer us the real solution here:
You keep pugs relevant by making objectives so big and widespread that no single organization can dominate it.

Small matchups like 5v5 Arenas or 20v20 battlegrounds are a disaster for pugs because it's really easy to get 5 people to play together a lot, and fairly reasonable to get 20 people together. But the bigger the number, the harder it becomes. There were organized outfits in Planetside that could dominate one battle, but that was one battle out of several on a continent, and one continent of several in play. In the end, Planetside and WW2O were dominated by pug power because the objectives were too big, too spread out and too populated for an organized group to completely dominate. You'd hear about big guilds dominating the battlefields but they were still only a small part of their overall team.


I think there was a study somewhere saying how maximum stable guild size tended to reflect the ability of people to hold any kind of large social group together. There's a point where it just naturally begins to splinter. I think that's what you want in an MMO: objectives that aren't fought over by 5v5 in a small room or 20v20 in a small field, but 500v500 in an area so big your section of it is only a 20th of the whole.

And IMO, that's what an MMO should be.

If it's 20 v 20, it doesn't need to be an MMO at all.