Social Psych and MMO's

Mostly to try out this "trackback" thing, I'm going to comment on Damion's Monday Design question on a franchise superhero MMO here:

As it stands, the MMO's I've played do a pretty piss-poor job of making you believe you're in another world.  CoH cocks it up with the zillions of superheroes with stupid names running all over the place;  WoW cocks it up with the queues in front of respawning quest characters.  Why not just accept that it's cocked up and let everybody be whoever?

But what I'd personally like to see is you get rid of the MM in your MMO and have instanced Manhattans with only a hundred, hundred-fifty tops, superheros each.  You'd still get a lot of competition for Wolverine and Spider-Man, to be sure, and maybe you could resolve that on the aforementioned ladder system, but what really excites me about the idea is that if you break your social groups up into guild-sized chunks you increase the likelihood of social bonds forming among the players, and you eliminate the feeling that "everybody's super."  Because...when everybody's super, no one is.

On the guild-sized chunks thing - you'd want to subdivide even further than that.  There was some study I can't find a reference to right now where they compared a dorm hall of 60 people to a dorm hall that had been partitioned into groups of 15 - the people in the partitioned dorm were more likely to form friendships with other students in the dorm.  I could imagine an MMO where when you first get dumped in you're only exposed to a handful of other people, and thus more likely to form some friendships with strangers, because it's not this overwhelming seething mass.

Comments

[Joel Martinez]

so ... Guild Wars?

[Jeffool]

I don't know about currently, but back in the day with Ultima Online, after a brief walk through a dungeon that explaind the basics, you entered an instanced relatively small 'welcome area' for lack of a better word. They even had users (not sure if they were paid or not,) to be there and help people. It was a great way to meet people who were also just starting the game (or restarting.) The problem there was that often you would spawn in the welcome area with either no or few people in it.

I love the idea of each hero being one player per server. And if that person quits playing the hero 'dies', only to be 'reborn' when the next player starts playing him. But you say instanced servers, I'm thinking you mean like Diabo.

I'd much prefer a different kind of server. Where they are created on users whims, but after creation, are persistant. 'Open servers' would be where anyone can jump in and grab any available hero. 'Closed servers' being where groups of friends can create their own Marvel Manhatten and admittance be invite only. If someone quits the server entirely (like leaving a server in WoW,) their hero 'dies', but not if they simply log out. I don't know, but I assume this would be costlier to run as it requires some world info stored on servers so that if everyone logged out of a server, the world-state would be kept or advanced to a degree. (If an Onslaught instance is spawned and everyone logs out, they should log back in to a city that's been largely trashed, etc.) I have no clue how much that would cost the developers.

This way the comic community CBR (comicbookresources.com) can have their own server with just CBRers, the gaming communities like EvilAvatar could have their own, etc.

But man, if they wrapped that up in a selection screen with The Watcher (from What if...?) helping the player choose a Multiverse... I'd be in geek heaven.

[Factory]

Hmm, from playing MMOs I also agree that the MM bit is highly overrated. Back in the MUD days when the genre was formed, only the biggest muds could even get close to the numbers of ppl on one server of a modern MMO.
Many of the problems that affect modern day MMOs could be fixed by going back to small population servers. Farmers, for instance would prolly not have such a good time of many smaller markets, and reputation would be somewhat more important. You can get rid of instancing, since the overcrowding problems will not exist. You could also prolly have characters affecting the game world too, and they could prolly be smaller.
OTOH you'd prolly have to make it easier to group with characters of different levels (or possibly remove restrictions altogether) and you'd have to have some way for ppl to move between servers, to allow guilds and player friends to meet up. Oh and it would prolly require more computing resources to handle many smaller servers, rather than a few large servers.