John A. Bertoglio wrote:
> With a graphic mud,
> no matter how sophisticated the tool set, an amateur effort will almost
> always look...amateur. The skill set to build a credible world with custom
> graphic content is just too broad for most potential hobbyists.
> Snip...
Your E-mail got me thinking about a few issues (some of which are just
reworded versions of yours):
1) It's a LOT of work to create a graphical world, which REQUIRES players to
form large groups to accomplish their tasks. As a guestimate, to make an
exact clone of a professional MMORPG, you need 10x the volunteers, due to
lack of time/experience. Thus, to clone WoW you'd need 1000+ volunteers.
Leading an army of volunteers is like hearding cats because they don't have
a paycheck to keep them following the leader, only the vision/goal.
Which leads me to think of an concept, which I'll mis-relate to the Dunbar
Number (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar_number). My variation is: "The
more focused and popular a vision/goal is, the more volunteers that can be
sustainably organized to achieve it."
Thus, if I were to espouse a vision/goal of "Creating a WoW clone down to
the last pixel," I'd get an army of volunteers, and they'd be "sticky"
volunteers.
However, if my goal were to "Make the best MMO ever", which is vague and
fuzzy, I'd start out with a lot of volunteers, perhaps 1000. And then
there'd be a split over some feature (butter side up vs. butter side down),
and there'd be two teams with 500 each. Eventually, each of those would
split over a dispute. Ad infintum, until there were hundreds of groups all
trying to create "The best MMO ever, but with feature XYZ."
To point out a example of "Creating a WoW clone down to the last pixel",
just look at Linux. The original goal of Linux was to "Create a free clone
of Unix", which is clear, concise, and a good rallying point. This then
became, "Create a competitor to the evil empire, Windows", which is also
clear, etc.
What this implies is that (a) you can get a large group of volunteers to
create a clone of a popular product, but (b) you can't get a large group of
volunteers to be creative since they'll fragment into smaller groups.
(c) Graphical MMO projects fail because large groups of volunteers (needed
to actually complete a MMO) fracture into small groups (< 10 people), and
they all eventually give up because they don't have the manpower
individually. (I'm guessing that fracturing stops around 5-10 people because
by that point "friendship" is often strong enough to keep the group
together, despite the goal being fuzzy.)
(d) Text MUDs can be completed with 5-10 people, so there are more text MUDs
despite there being many more potential MMORPG authors.
By the way, I've just described politics 101 (sound-byte vision to lead
"volunteer" voters), marketing 101 (sound-byte slogans), and why armies are
divided into platoons (friendship).
2) Providing a default world is good (but a double-edged sword).
A large default world provides sample code/graphics, which makes creating a
new world easier because there are lots of examples to start from.
A large default world can attract players right away. Around 0.1% to 1% of
players(?) join the development team, so lots of players produces more
developers/builders. More developers/builders means more content, which
means more players. Positive feedback cycle.
This would be PERFECT if there were only one version of the default world.
However, the easier (and better) the default world is to set up, the more
versions of it that will be created... And thus begins stock MUD syndrome.
Eventually, there will be so many copies of the exact same world, that
players will be divided up amongst them all, and so are the developers.
Ultimately, no meaningful changes get made to the default world because
there aren't enough developers in each.
Thus, if a stock world is too easy to set up (and too good), then there will
be zillions of stock worlds, all identical, and all with only one person on
the development team. The single developer will get frustrated with his/her
lack of progress and give up. The player base, in general, will get
frustrated with the stock MUDs all being identical, and never come back.
So there's some sort of balance between the size/quality of the default
world, and how succesful the toolkit ultimately is. Too small (aka: don't
attract many players or provide much sample code) and the toolkit fails. Too
large (aka: lots of copies of the world are made) and the toolkit also
fails.
How big was the default Diku world? 2000 rooms?