Interdependency

Last post, called “Endgame”, I wrote about how a player-driven economy can be never-ending - a perpetual game. I believe that for MMOs which are meant to be played indefinitely, it’s desirable to offer such endless mechanics that not only allow play to just continue on forever, but also make good use of a “massively multiplayer” games’ biggest and most unique resource: other players.

I wrote about how item degradation is an important part of making a player-driven economy work, but I did not mention another, hugely important element, which is interdependency. You simply can’t have a working, perpetual, player-driven economy without it.

The Underlying Idea

MMORPG games like for example Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) do attempt do fulfill the fantasy of living in a virtual world, by allowing players to take on different roles within the game. There were weaponsmiths and armorsmiths, droid engineers, chefs, merchants, shipwrights, tailors, doctors, creature handlers, architects, politicians, entertainers, etc.

You can’t be a shop-keeper if nobody has any reason to buy anything from you. You can’t be a dancer if nobody has any reason to watch you dance. You can’t be an armorsmith if nobody has any reason to wear the armor you make. You can’t be a droid engineer if nobody has any reason to want your droids. You can’t be a mercenary if nobody has any reason to hire you to fight for them.

I am intentionally choosing SWG specifically as an example here - and not a themepark like World of Warcraft (WoW), because in the latter type of game you cannot be a simple craftsman in the firstplace. You are the chosen one. The big hero who will defeat evil and save the world. Just like everyone else.

To the NPCs and the story of the game, you are “the one”. To all the other players, you are nobody. To them, THEY are “the one” and you are nothing, just background decoration. A nameless extra. But in a social sandbox game like SWG - you actually can be a shop-keeper/dancer/mercenary/doctor. Not just to NPCs, but to other players. And what you do will actually matter - not just to NPCs, but to other players. Those other players do have good reasons to buy your merchandise, wear your armor, watch you dance, hire you. Main reason being: they can’t just do it themselves.

The Prerequisites To Make It Work

First of all, each such role or profession has to be fleshed out with enough depth and gameplay to be a full-fledged standalone play experience. Not just some side-activity, but involved and complex enough to be a players sole main activity in the game. It should be encompassing enough, to fully keep a player occupied and having fun on it’s own. It should not feel like being limited to a small part of the game - it should feel like getting your favourite part, while doing more would be overwhelming.

You might desire the lead singer role in an opera project - but you don’t want to play every role in the piece, while also directing, while also playing every instrument in the orchestra, while also handling the lighting and technical stuff, while also building the coulisse, while also hole-punching tickets at the entrance… (Or you wouldn’t want to be tank, damage dealer and healer at the same time - when combat is designed to stress out three people each doing only one of those roles at a time, and makes it pretty much impossible to fill all three at once.) no - each single role should provide a full game on it’s own.

Secondly, there have to be many different such roles or professions, and they should be as diverse as possible. They should be covering a broad width of different playstyles, ranging from frentic combat to cozy crop-farming, from underground mining to sky-high construction, from fishing to taming, from cooking to politics, from killing to healing and more. The choices should be so varied that everyone should be able to find something to their individual taste - no matter what that taste might be.

Thirdly, every such role or profession must both provide goods and services that other roles need - as well as beeing in need of goods and services provided by other roles. No profession may be an island, independent of everyone else. And you want each role to provide for many, many other roles, as well as depend on many, many others - not just one or two. The dependency graph showing who needs what from whom should be a criss-crossing mess, like a spiderweb when the spider is on drugs.

And last but not least, you need to ensure that no player can fill more than just a very few roles. You might not want to limit players down to just one - for multiple reasons. Like it might be hard to create a fully engrossing gameplay experience for just one role. Or you might want players to mix and match to create more diversity in builds, so that it becomes far rarer for two characters to end up with exactly the same combination.

All of these things are mandatory requirements. You can not fulfill that underlying idea of having players take on roles that matter to other players, without all of these points in place. It just can’t work.

Side-note: An Example Of What Happens When Players Try To Do Everything

There is an interesting anecdote about SWG, found in a blog post written by Raph Koster.

And LucasArts marketing says, “we need a Jedi by Christmas.” The rocky launch and general bugginess had cost us a huge number of subscribers. Oh, we were still the second biggest MMO outside of Asia, behind EverQuest, but the expectations were much higher. Many players had simply churned out, unwilling to deal with the general jankiness. But the game was improving by leaps and bounds, and marketing wanted to get a fresh flow of users in now that the game was actually working.

We looked at the rate at which people were unlocking their skill boxes, and did a back of the envelope calculation. It showed that the first Jedi might manifest in… 2012 or so. Marketing was not amused. “Drop hints,” the team was told.

I was already half off the team, commuting between Austin and San Diego every week or two. (I would eventually move at the end of the year). But I am pretty sure I was in at least some of the meetings. The decision was made to drop Holocrons, hint boxes that would tell you one of the skills you needed to learn.

The problem is obvious: as soon as three people all have gotten a hint that what they need is to master a specific skill box, the secret was out. It was weak cryptography. As the confirming data poured in that none of the Holocrons involved anything other than skills, the players set themselves with a will to trying to crack their personal codes. And they used the oldest trick in the book: brute force.

They simply started at A and learned every skill. In order. Probability being what it was, most finished when they got partway through. But the problem was this meant playing what you didn’t like.

The peaceful dancers who thrived on joking around with an audience and doing coordinated flourishes found themselves tramping around the mud looking for mineral deposits.

The explorers who enjoyed exploring distant swamps got themselves trapped in medical centers, buffing an endless line of combatants.

The doctors who derived their pleasure from helping out people in a support role found themselves learning martial arts or machine guns and mowing down creatures.

The combat specialists who were used to optimizing damage per second in taking down a krayt dragon were instead raising them from babies.

The creature handlers who tended dewbacks had to learn to chop them up and cook them instead.

You get the idea. Everyone started playing everything they didn’t like. Oh, some players discovered new experiences they never would have otherwise. Many emerged from this with a new understanding of the fundamental interconnectedness of a society. But most just macroed their way or grinded their way through it all as fast as possible, dazzled by the booby prize of Jedi.

Satisfaction fell off a cliff. I never did see a marketing push for Jedi — never saw a marketing push for the game at all, to tell the truth. But what I do know is that one month after Holocron drops began, we started losing subs, instead of gaining them. SWG had been growing month on month until then. After Holocrons, the game was dead; it was just that nobody knew it yet.

(Raph Koster, 2015 - emphasis added)

And there you have it - players trying to do do every profession in the game - is what killed SWG. According to Raph. Isn’t that interesting?

Now there are people out there on the internet, who will tell you that doing everything and being fully self-sufficient, is a playstyle - and they are correct. In survival games that are not designed for having these different roles and making each a full gameplay experience on it’s own, covering a broad range of diverse playstyles across many vastly different professions… there you get only one playstyle, with several different skills that provide some side-activities each. In these games, if you actually want a truly different playstyle (like more or less combat oriented, etc.) - you gotta pick a different game.

But SWG brought all those different playstyles together. And through your choice of profession(s), you ultimately decided what kind of game you wanted to play. The game experience could be vastly different, depending on what you chose. And those different playstyles where really made to play together and with each other - not just side by side, next to each other. And that’s what makes SWG a social sandbox MMORPG, and thus vastly different to a multiplayer survival game. It’s an entirely different genre. Even if these days we do see games trying to blur the lines, and games that are survival games at their heart, being marketed as MMORPGs - you’ll never find a survival game covering the same range of truly different playstyles, and you’ll never find a game with a working, truly player-driven economy without some role separation and interdependency.

But enough of this tangent, let’s get back on topic.

Additional Stuff

Before I got distracted, I was listing the mandatory requirements to make interdependency work (which in itself is one of several mandatory requirements to make a truly player-driven economy work).

But there are more requirements to make a player-driven economy work, and a lot more not strictly necessary things, you’ll still want to have to significantly improve the player experience of the interdepence.

• lots of convenient, low-friction tools to support an enable trade and interchange of goods and services between players. ideally a player should be able to get everything they need from other roles, buy simply visiting an NPC vendor (stocked with player-provided goods) and buying it - as simple as that. players should also be able to place orders for goods/services. have easy access to exchange markets. selling their own goods/services should be equally simple and straight forward. and you do want for players to have multiple different avenues for buying and selling.

• lots of available niches to fill. allowing one guild-backed crafter to dominate the market of an entire game server - or even worse, the entire game, can break the economy. small regional markets are needed, and each item needs to exist in a variety of different qualities (different stats) - so that multiple different price points can co-exist for the same item (and direct price comparison becomes hard). and items should also be available with different side-grades which are all varyingly attractive to different players and character builds. two players practising the same profession should be able to co-exist by specalizing on different market segments, price points and side-grades. bulk-produced vs. made-to-order, etc.

• regional markets that are separated by transport costs - but still connected to a large global economy. that global economy ideally is not even split by server - it has to be as large as it can be, because sheer size is the best way to increase resilience against market manipulation attempts. but markets still need to be separated enough, to be able to co-exist at regional pricing - to enable arbitrage-funded cargo-transport. that does also preclude the existence of a global auction house - as well as the ability to transport goods by teleport or fast travel.

• no NPC-made offerings. because having unlimited items available at fixed prices will break supply/demand pricing. everything has to be player-made.

• creator-tags on items. the final item should display “made by X” to allow crafters to build a brand image and earn a reputation for their produce. also patrons should be able to follow or bookmark their favorite sellers, turning into regulars

• item degradation of course - the economy is not going to work, if items last forever and players can only sell to new players who don’t have their stuff yet. items can be long-lasting, but they need to eventually break and require replacement at some point.

• suppression of economies of scale. You want to design production costs, material availability, and everything, to not favor the biggest players. To not automatically make the rich get richer. you have to actively supress the economies’ natural tendency to creating monopolies (like in real life where monopolies get broken up by cartell law). This blog post by Raph has some interesting insights on that topic.

• And much much more. Way too much for me to think of it all, or list it all here. I hope the given examples are enough to at least give you an idea of how big and far-reaching this topic is.

The Many Benefits

If done right - and yes, it is definitely hard to get this right and balance it properly - interdependency is hugely beneficial to everyone involved:

• Players can live the fantasy of taking on these roles in a virtual society, as mentioned in “The Underlying Idea”
• You can achieve a player-driven economy that adds perpetual gameplay, as mentioned in the previous post “Endgame”
• Players can pick whatever they like doing most, and specialize in that, and keep doing that
• Players can find their own niche where they can get away with not being the server-best, or the server-cheapest
• Solo players can participate in the larger economy game, without having to team up or ever having to directly interact with other players face-to-face
• Guilds can work towards and achieve limited dominance over regional submarkets, without breaking the global economy by crushing all smaller players
• Every player matters, because everyone contributes something, that feeds into the larger economy and benefits others
• A large number of competing interests can co-exist, and despite competing, they still do cooperatively strengthen the economy overall
• Many vastly different playstyles can co-exist and do effectively support and rely on each other
• It creates a feeling of interconnectedness between players, that strengthens feelings of community

I strongly believe this is a system worthy of an MMO, as requires massive multiplayer and cannot be recreated in any other form of game. It makes use of and plays to the unique strengths and possibilities only found in MMOs.

Themeparks seem to have turned into mostly singleplayer style gameplay that just happens to be online and next to other players - while gameplay-wise still staying completely independent of those other players. (I know, I’m exaggerating and grossly lumping together there… but you get the idea).

When MMORPGs originally appeared, there was this dream of creating living virtual worlds and virtual, player-driven societies. And games back then tried to achieve that - as far as that was possible with the limited technology of the day. But then themeparks - a much better fit for that technology - got really big and became dominant and peaked - but ultimately failed to get anywhere near achieving that dream. The entire genre is now in decline.

I believe it’s time to revive that dream. To push far beyond what MMOs have become and are believed to be only capable off.