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No, Wait… Bots: Our Last, Best Hope For The MMO Industry
Adam Martin, late of NCsoft Europe and currently thinking deep thoughts, in the midst of writing an article about the potential size of the online industry (hint: it’s pretty damned big) postulates an interesting theory: it’s not in the interests of MMO developers to know the size of their own player base.
On average, each of you reading this probably has something like 200-300 separate online identities. On average, each of you reading this probably BELIEVES you have something like 2-3 separate online identities. Factor of 100 difference (have fun counting them…).
Those virtual identities are the lifeblood of online services. They are countable, they are serviceable – and they are uniquely and individually chargeable (even when several of these identities may represent just one real-world human: if the identities are separate, then you can charge multiple times, and many people really do willingly pay several times over!)
One of the most popular digs on Mythic when I was there was that “buff bots” were never properly dealt with due to the financial incentive towards keeping them around. This wasn’t entirely true, but the bottom line does have a certain seductive allure, and it’s in the interest of an effective game designer to champion the long term view (rampant botting pisses your players off and shrinks your market) over the short term view (bots pay money just like the rest of us!)
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about 1 year ago
At some level Ill always have a bit of seething disgust towards MJ for not having the balls to stop botting back when I first started screaming “the sky is falling” – which was the day after I met my first botted opponent in DAoC towards the end of the first year.
about 1 year ago
doh wheres my edit button
about 1 year ago
Who can forget the days of the one man, six character groups in EQ’s Planes of Power… I can’t. /shudder
about 1 year ago
In theory you’re correct, good game design should always correlate perfectly with long term revenue.
But on the other hand, we have World of Warcraft, so…
/scratches head
about 1 year ago
As compared to… what, exactly?
about 1 year ago
“bots pay money just like the rest of us!”
Yeah, and try to explain to your credit card company that it was your bot making all those extra charges, and not you!
about 1 year ago
Let us wait and see how the Federal Government handles botting since they wish to move into this field. And if it’s any indication as to what is currently being done it’ll be a bad fiasco!
about 1 year ago
Maybe instead of just making it legal, Blizzard should do something to ENCOURAGE multi-boxing.
about 1 year ago
the problem with botting in DAOC goes much farther than “rampant botting pisses players off,” and stopping there is extremely shortsighted.
what really pisses players off in the game is the insanely high level of differentiation buffs give between an unbuffed player. it was an irritation of necessity.
about 1 year ago
Well, if that’s the problem then Blizzard’s on the case because they just shivved buff stacking in the bollocks with their new “raid buff” change. Of course, now half of everybody’s buffs are useless, and those people are pissed.
Nobody’s ever happy.
about 1 year ago
I never saw botting as a problem. I mean you pretty much needed a few accounts to get the job done in DAOC. It is the same with any other MMO. Your player base does not exist to relive the same content over and over. At some point the bulk of your player base has moved past the content which a new player needs to run through to make it to endgame, and he has NO HELP AT ALL in these areas.
In DAOC, I needed a bot to get the new toons I made leveled up quickly and then moved through critical encounters. Botting was not just for RVR buffs. Heck, I had three accounts… my bot, my RVR main and my chanter account which I would reactivate to level new toons as needed.
It was so handy that I got two accounts in WAR just because I knew the feeling of not being able to find a healer for our group. Of course I never resubbed WAR due to the fact that it is basically a carbon copy of WOW’s quest grind, with the injected disappointment of no one playing healers to heal in the scenerios. But I digress.
Now I am looking at WOW, a game all my friends play but I have not in some time. They are all 70+ and I am not. I won’t be seeing them since WOW is yet another game that discourages you from grouping with people you know. I’m really thinking of multi-boxing shamans so I can know the joy of a group I can depend on.
I think having multiple accounts is a sign of poor design in the community department (and the only game I can remember where this was not the case was UO).
about 1 year ago
The problem with healers in WAR is a design issue. PvE (leveling) with them is eye-gougingly painful. They’re great fun in PvP though.
about 1 year ago
Hatch personified all thats wrong with botters in DAoC.
In a PVP game if you can pay twice as much to be twice as good(actully it was more) you have a game that is ruined.
Hatch rationalizes all his choices on the basis of PVE – but of course he still uses the advanatage in PVP – thus ruining the game.
I must say DAoC was fairly unique though in just how powerful and unfair a second account could be. In most games you have to take both toons into combat to get any advantage and you probably have actively play both. So well you may be better off from the other sides perspective its just fighting 2 people and one of them isnt playing at the highest level.
In DaoC having a bot just meant that your character in combat was over 2.5 times as good as an enemy.
about 1 year ago
“In theory you’re correct, good game design should always correlate perfectly with long term revenue.
But on the other hand, we have World of Warcraft, so…”
World of Warcraft is the McDonald’s of MMOs, it’s easy, accessible, and has been socially accepted.
For an example of the theory in practice, Eve Online is always the best example of what happens when you build a quality product. They may not have the raw numbers that WoW does, but I also think they are the only MMO that has had a continuous growth in players over it’s lifetime.
The question is “how do you define success?” For WoW, it’s subscriber numbers. For Eve, it’s knowing you’ve got a quality product.
Actually, the question is really “how do you investors describe success?” But then again, that’s an issue for another day..
about 1 year ago
“Hatch personified all thats wrong with botters in DAoC.”
lol… yeah I am a complete evil bastard, electing to use my bot so I could have a fair fight. I think in all the time I played I fought exactly ONE unbotted guy 1v1. Your message seemed to vilify the status quo. It seems a little overboard.
Between stealth zerging and class imbalances it isn’t like the game was carefully balanced.
about 1 year ago
The funny thing is, EvE is said to be one of the better games to dual-box, since it’s slow enough, you can easily manage two accounts. The best combo being a miner and some kind of offensive ship, so you can defend your miner.
Dual Boxing just got uggly in DAOC over the fact that it did show how bad Buffs where in that game.
about 1 year ago
It’s the next step of the MMO industry: catering to customers who literally do not exist.
about 1 year ago
A refresher for that have forgotten:
http://xzzy.org/files/games/eq/eq-mad2boxing.jpg
Not sure why this doesn’t happen anymore. I’ve heard of some people in WoW playing two mages with one keyboard, but never running an entire group. I’d guess it’s because WoW requires everyone to mash buttons really fast, which would quickly get out of hand for a full party.
about 1 year ago
“Actually, the question is really “how do you investors describe success?”
Duh. It’s all about the benjamins or they won’t stay investors very long.
about 1 year ago
Here’s the setup from a WoW player who plays 36 separate characters (that’s $5711 in subscription costs per year) simultaneously on 11 computers…
http://videogames.yahoo.com/featurescreenshot?eid=1255557&index=0
about 1 year ago
“Not sure why this doesn’t happen anymore. I’ve heard of some people in WoW playing two mages with one keyboard, but never running an entire group. I’d guess it’s because WoW requires everyone to mash buttons really fast, which would quickly get out of hand for a full party.”
LOL… It happens all the time. Every server has at least one full party multi player, and some servers have numerous. You can run all five instances on one machine with only a modest hardware setup (quad core, 4gbRAM and 4850+ level card). WOW is arguably the easiest game to do this on since the battle chest is so cheap and the button mashing and auto face on casting take care of you so well. 5 ele shamans or 4 ele shamans and one prot pally are the most common setup.
about 1 year ago
At one point in my life I had 5 boxes set up playing SWG (I wanted to craft everything) and then EVE.
Kind of a sad point in my life, I admit, but being a stay at home dad can get boring. Heh.
I did have a shammy bot for my warrior in DAoC, but only when my wife was working or was unable to play.
about 1 year ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8uLUBEPB-U&feature=related
Heroic Magister’s Terrace multi-boxed with five shaman.
about 1 year ago
“Kind of a sad point in my life, I admit, but being a stay at home dad can get boring. Heh.”
I don’t think it’s sad at all… people spend more money and time on cable TV than online gaming accounts and that is fine, but when the ratio changes it suddenly isn’t?
It is all recreation. No different than poker or going to the movies. MMO’s just have an extremely good return of enjoment for the money you spend (unless you play a game made by Verant).
about 1 year ago
Nice to see the spiritual warfare of reality and simulacrum still in full swing.