Monetizing Wograld, a Guide to Avoiding Evil

  Game developers have families. They should be able to support them solely with their game development efforts. Hence, games need some way to monetize, that is to make money. Game developers should not depend on handouts from family members who do not even like gaming, such as grandma who doesn’t play games. Instead they should make money from those who do play games, but who have decided that they would rather do other things with their time, and find other ways of making money, other than in the development of games. If game developers are the only ones who support other game developers, you end up with a situation, that is much like the sad situation in life coaching, where the so called big money is in what is known as coach coaching. The people who could really benefit from the service are ignored, in favor of people of think they need the service, but probably don’t. 

   So, now that we have made the determination that game developers need to make a decent living, we are left with ways that games can make money. Much of the time, free software zealots have made software as a service to be some kind of evil, evil like facebook, twitter and microsoft, stealing your private data for corporate gain. On the practical side however, people still use servers, and in some cases some sort of centralized, or semi-centralized server makes technical sense. Everyone wants to federate everything, and while that is a laudable goal, as a practical matter people just visit other people’s web servers all the time, if only to do some online shopping. 

   So, first of all, we need to remind people that this is just game data, your character, your characters stuff, and statistics stored in some remote location on the internet. It isn’t all this personal information about you, the person, but rather some avatar completely abstracted from the person playing it. Secondly, we need to remind people that online games do have benefits not achieved in single player games, benefits of dynamic content and social interactions. This does not mean that every game can, or should be an online game. Some games are single player, and should just stay that way, paid for in advance by people who want it developed, rather than collecting royalties for every copy sold. But for those multi-player games, server hosting is a perfectly ethical way to make a living. 

   Now, just setting up a server does not make a game developer rich, in fact it cost money, both in hardware and hosting, so all the more reason to justify charging users for using it. But users are loath to pay money for something if they don’t even know if it is any good. Hence many servers give out something like cheap trial memberships, with a limited set of features enabled for free accounts, while paid accounts get more features enabled. This is a great way for game developers to make money. 

   Sometimes, this is not enough, and naturally game developers want to make as much money as they can make from developing games. So, game developers came up with the idea of loot boxes. These are random items that may or may not enhance game play, either by allowing characters to progress further in the game faster, allowing them to do things they could not otherwise do, or by changing a characters appearance. 

  Let us take these ideas one at a time. First let us discuss the idea of progressing in a game faster. Some people like to spend money on games to progress faster because they have a real job and not a lot of time to play games. They want to keep up with all the kids who have stupid jobs, and no families and come home and play games for hours on end, not to mention the no lifers who have some kind of disability and spend almost all their waking hours on the game. Hence, the need to sell faster progression in a game to users so they can be competitive with those who have too much time to waste on the game. The mechanism of spending real life money to go faster in a game only makes logical sense, and does not ruin anyone elses game play of spending hours grinding for in game currency. 

   The second idea, adding items that allow characters to do things in game they could not otherwise, is almost always a terrible idea, especially if it is a limited time thing that gives people advantages over others who did not get the item. If the item is always available, it isn’t much of a problem unless it is insanely expensive. As far as things they could not otherwise do, this is only acceptable if it is a minor thing that has little direct effect on game play, say opening a hidden chest with extra gold in it. If it becomes a major game changing item, then it amounts to problems. All the not rich players will quit, and the rich players will quit because the game got boring since they have no one to play with anymore, and playing on an empty server got boring. 

   The third idea is a purely cosmetic item. This has the least impact on game play, and even if these are limited time items, it still has limited impact on game play. In spite of the fact people love to dress up their paper doll cutouts, pets and houses, cosmetic items are relatively non-controversial in games. That doesn’t mean it is without controversy, only that it causes much less issues. Cosmetic items can also be given out for special supporters of the game, such as people that did things like testing, bug reporting, or even in the case of a free software game, actual development. 

   In addition to the concern about game unbalance changes, there is a concern that the randomness of loot boxes promotes gambling, and lures underage kids into wasting thousands of dollars on a parents credit card, because they don’t know what they will get on a random loot spin. Many games made the goodies random because it encourages the spending of more money in hopes of getting the good item that the player wanted to get. 

   While I admit I haven't made up my mind on whether random loot boxes should be allowed in games, I will qualify it with the idea that making a game proprietary software is far worse than loot-boxes. If players don’t like the loot boxes and think they are unfair in a free software game, they can take the feature out and run their own servers. Perhaps they are fine idea for some games, and wildly inappropriate for others. Personally, I do not think they belong in Wograld because the game mechanics in Wograld are simplistic enough for a younger audience to enjoy so, it would probably be better to leave them out and avoid the controversy.

Why I started a patreon account

When I first considered making a patreon account is when someone on reddit mentioned that I should do it.  I already knew several other creators who had made one.  A lot of them in the free/software culture space didn't' seem to get much money from it, so I figured it would be a waste of my time.  Then I changed my mind. I read all kinds of things, like wait till you have a big following to make one, or do it as a last ditch effort. 

I read this horrid page where some guy sounds like he is begging for money, yet he still got over 1,000 a month, that is less than minimum wage, but still, he got the money because he is semi-famous.  I realized more and more it has nothing to do with cool rewards you get from subscribing or the merit of the work being created, but rather, how popular the creator is, that is how many people know about his or her work, that more or less determines it.

Free software has a marketing problem.  We make so many cool things, but people would rather pay micropayments for mobile games, waste money on a fancy graphics rig and play games that are boring (with terrible game play) or buy indie games on steam, only to deal with the fact that none of these options have the modifiability or customization options of free software games.

Why do we do it?  Traditional proprietary software offers easy monitization options for the developer, including micropayments, pay once and we are done (as long as you still have the account/drm key/ disk), or pay a subscription fee for monthly online access(mostly replaced with micropayments for cosmetic items or even to get through the game faster).  The developers take these options, but if they fail to market the game properly, they still make little to no money at making the game.

But here is the thing, making a game free software with free cultural assets does not really change the monitization options all that much.  You might think, OMG! its so revolutionary, but it is even less revolutionary than the old Red Hat business model. You can still sell virtual items on a server and charge for "premium accounts." Yeah, the source code and art work is free, but server admins time and hardware is not. As far as single player offline games go, there is always the pay up front before the game is finished model.  That is people pay before it is even done. Once a game is done, you don't need to pay over and over every time you make a copy of the disk or put it on a different computer.  Its not like the developer is actually doing any additional work because you made another copy of some game, you did the work, not the original developer.  Same thing if you decide to modify the game.  It just makes sense for people to be paid for actual work done, rather than the printing of fake money.

So in conclusion, I think that we should pay live people for work they actually do, rather than dead people who arn't doing anything anymore, and despite what they ancient greeks thought, we don't put coins in dead people's eyes anymore.

Why PVP based Multi-Player Online Roleplaying games should be open source

This is a post based on a reply I made on Reddit.  When I read the initial post, I realized how my game is using the power of open source to solve some inherent issues with PVP based Multi-player Online Role Playing Games.

The first issue mentioned was performance.  While open source itself does not help directly with this, the Wograld policy of keeping system requirements low helps a lot with this issue.  Who cares if the graphics are beautiful if you can barely play due to the frame rate.  Forget about pvp then, because performance will be so abysmal for many people that you will hardly be able to pvm.

The next two issues are things that are directly resolved through the useage of open source for both the client and server of the game.  Bugs were explictly mentioned.  A lot of games (I'm looking at you Runescape.) have ongoing bugs that are never fixxed even though the developers probably know about them. With open source, the playerbase can directly fix bugs and actually commit a fix in order that the bug just goes away.  Eric Raymond is famous for his quote "With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." Well, now by having all the code, both client and server open source, it will be shallow enough that finnally the bugs can get fixxed.

The second issue deals with game balance.  Ideally, the developers will understand game balance and how communities work.  They should understand the underlying dynamics, and while they should listen to the players, they shouldn't necessarily give them what they ask for, instead they should make a game that creates a healthy and thriving community, and not one where all the players quit over time because game balance is too broken. Sometimes, the developers fall into blind spots and never actually understand how communities work.  If that happens, the original game code still exists and the community itself can fork, and players can play a balanced non-broken game instead of a broken one.

The last issue mentioned deals with cheating. Some people think closed source software somehow prevents or lowers cheating, but looking at all the closed source proprietary games with cheating problems proves that closing up the source code does not prevent cheating.  Instead, some games though they could prevent cheating and still have certain calculations running on the client side.  Cheating can be prevented by running things on the server side.

Bank Boxes and Bugs

Last weekend, my lead programmer finished implementing bank boxes. I kept saying how most RPG's have bank boxes.  For those who do not know about what that means, let me explain.  Characters in computer role playing games often have an inventory where they carry stuff they might need in the course of the game.  That can end up being a lot of items with no real way to organize them.  In addition, in some games, items can be lost upon death or stolen.  Characters may also have a weight or item limit for what they can carry around.  Bank boxes allow characters to put items in them for later usage.  In between adventures, the character can visit the bank box to deposit or take out items.  This bank box can be only accessed in certain usually safe locations, such as towns.  The rest of the time thesse tiesm are not accessable.
Most multi-player online roleplaying games of any size have this feature, so I knew that wograld should have it as well.

I tested the bank boxes and I have not found any bugs with the feature so far.  Unfortunately, I found another serious bug that will have to be fixed before we can even consider a permanent multi-player server.  That is, if you disconnect the client a certain common way, the server will crash.  I have told him to fix that. 

Version Out of Control

I wrote that post title cause I just got the maps and sounds committed under the README folder because no one could make new modules under the CVS folder anymore. According to google, no one else has attempted it either.  Sourceforge documentation is still crap, or maybe it was good for awhile and then got crappy again.  It doesn't help that the new platform isn't going to allow any new cvs repositories, not that anyone would want any new cvs repositories.  Do they even develop cvs anymore? Maybe not. 

Initially people had to download maps and sounds from the crossfire project, the one we forked from, but since we added the gathering skills, I felt we needed some new maps just to test them out.  How can we possiably get this thing ready for alpha without basic game play like gathering skills useable by the players?

In other news, over 250,000 players signed up for old school Runescape.  Unlike the so called "meritocracy" of free software  multi-player role playing games, Runescape and other proprietary (server and graphics) mmorpgs's got it right by having gathering skills for newbies right at the time of release.  They knew the one important way to hook people and get them to play it for years and years.

That is a problem with the free software community. They can make a microsoft office clone and a web browser, but when it comes to games (Specifically morpgs), they can't get the features right. 

I'm kind of dreading the move to the allura platform even though I know I shouldn't because after all the platform itself is free software, something free software zealots have been complaining about from sourceforge for years.  I guess I just like (hate?) CVS too much to let it go.

Top Ten reasons not to play Wograld right now

Most people go about promoting their games, saying how great they are, only to be disappointed by bugs and poor game play, as well as bad "programmer art" I on the other hand, will beg and plead with you do not go to the cvs, download wograld, try to compile and run it, and worse yet, try to actually play it. I will give you ten reasons that even though the code is right there, you should not touch it, compile it, run it, or even look at it.

10. Its only been tested on Linux... trying it on the windows system like enough said.

9. You have to follow the admin install directions, if you are the sort of person who is reading this and doing it anyway, even though I said not to , you are not a person who follows directions, so you are not going to do well with getting it set up so it works.

8. Missing artwork. There is only one character class and race that shows artwork in game, otherwise you will be playing an invisible character.

7. Same poor game play as crossfire, only with some missing artwork, so you won't even know what killed you half the time. If you want crossfire, just go play it, but why would you considering how awful it really is.

6. No permanent server set up, how fun is it really going to be playing with yourself...

5. You have to play as root or it won't save your character, or you have to change the permissions on some folders.

4. Did I mention the bad game play, lets go into detail, one hit killed as a newbie sorcerer with a swinging door. Should sorcerers really be that frail? No freaking way!

3.Level system, and experience loss when you die, you lose stats too, so you can get worse than a newb fast.

2. You don't have to die to lose stats and experience, fighting certain monsters will also do this.

1. Ta Da, the number one reason not to play Wograld right now... The user interface is really bad. You won't be able to figure it out. It is ugly, has buttons that do nothing, and no way to know what macros you have easily.

User Interface design

User interface design is, IMHO one of the most important parts of designing any sort of software. Without a user interface, the user can not use the software in any meaningful manner. For command line tools, just having a syntax and an explination of what the various options mean is fine. However, when we get into graphical programs written for end users rather than just sys admins, we need to think a bit differently about what is nesessary. For a long time, there were MUDS, or for the less informed, multi-user dungeons. Basically, these were text based chat games. You would enter a "room" like a chat room, but this room had a description of it. You would define your character, often very much like in a regular role-playing game, but, of course it was all in text, so when the blob hit you for 2 points, you did not see a blob, you did not see a screen, you did not see a character who was slowly losing health. Only the lines of text could tell you what was going on. You had to create the entire picture in your mind, a far more difficult feat than merely reading a book, because, after all, you also had to figure out what to do about the fact that this blob had just hit you for two points.

These early games, in addition to having to imagine the whole thing, also posed problems with the user interface. When you finally killed the blob (unfortunately it was more likely that it killed you), you had to figure out how to loot its corpse. There was no double clicking on that blob on the screen. There was no mouse over, it was all key board. Then you had to figure out how to equip items. There was no drag and drop with the mouse. Even worse, there was generally a lot of reading of instructions before you could get to the actual playing of the game, simply to figure out how you could get out of the forest dead end road. You could not simply move your mouse to an opening in the path, you had to try every direction, where you would get the ominous message "you cannot go that way." and frequently forget what paths you did try.

Today, we have progressed far beyond the need to have an IQ of 200 (and more importantly a lot of patience) to play an mmorpg. A complete newbie can be moving the mouse around, and in seconds, he or she has managed to move the character, equip items, and fight that first battle.

However, crossfire, and thus its fork, Wograld, has a teriable user interface as of right now. (although if you are reading the archieves hopefully this has changed). The windows for stats, inventory,looting (also knowing as walking over floor tiles), chat, and hitting things have taken up most of the screen space, leaving little to see the actual game. Wograld has already improved this over crossfire, giving more screen real estate to the actual game. Yet the problem is that much of these windows need to be closed, that is hidden, so that they are not in the way of playing the game most of the time, except when you need to see them. Also, additional windows need to be added, that can also be minimized into a button in the same fashion, things like buttons for macros, detailed listings of your stats and skills, a quest log, a party screen, a map, detailed chat logs, all need to be made in this manner.

We have started a discussion on the forums about the user interface design, go see it and participate here.

Discussion about Wograld user interface

Shell Scripts part 2

I know in my last blog I said that I only needed the Makefile.am in the directories. Well, I found out I was wrong. Makefile.in is what is needed to make the configure create the Makefile without all the autotools. This is a better way to go in case someone has a different version of autotools. Old versions of autotools do not work with new versions of scripts, and you can not use different versions of autotools for the configure and then another for the make.
I'm still somewhat confused as to how all the autoscripts work. It is better than having to write an install program from scratch. I hate to think of what is involved in making binary packages for a distro, but since we do not have a release yet, I do not think we need to worry about it. I have found that binary distro packages are not that great anyway, because only the old version is packaged up, and not the latest version that you invariably need if you want to play a multi-player game with other people. Often, you all need the same version.

I am also still no expert on shell scripts although I have learned some things. In all honesty, I would rather be writing quests/dialog or creating artwork than trying to figure out all the arcane meanings of funny script terms. Once I know how it works, I do not mind creating scripts, it is the learning part I detest. In fact, that is a big part of what I spent November on rather than just working on the shell script. I have been writing a novel about a guy who starts a free software project.

The problem with Leveling in games

Many typical RPGs and like games, such as Crossfire, have a level system. This system frequently has levels that can go as high as in the 100's or as low as ten (but frequently this number is scaled up and up in order for the developers to create more content without doing any real work). When a character gains a level, she also gains stats. She might gain in strength, dexterity, intellect, or whatever other attributes are put into the game. The problem is she has 100 levels, so say she starts with 20 strength, and then gains a point in strength every level, now at level 100 she has 120 strength. The newbie character logs in with his 20 strength newbie. The problem is she is going to really be 6 times more powerful, so then, what happens if she decides now that she has maxed out her character, her new mission in life is to grief newbies. The newbies don't really have much of a chance against her.

But the real issue is that instead of 100 levels, there might be thousands of levels. By the time you get a maxed leveled character, that is several years of work. No lifers play day in and day out to get max level, and some games don't even really have a cap on levels, so the no lifer has this character that is several times more powerful than that of the casual player. The no lifer then dominates everyone, and everyone else realizes they will never get that powerful, so they quit. This is bad for the game, because eventually the no-lifer realizes that he is the only one left playing it, and he would rather rank up on a chart where he has some real competition, not just who had no life for so many years.

Ultima Online did it well. Swing a sword, gain points in dexterity and strength, cast a spell, gain a point in intellect, up to a reasonable cap for your total stats. I think it was something like 255 total, with a max of 150 in any given stat, and up to 25 more points with stat scrolls. But this way there were no uber l33t character with thousands more hit points than the newbie. Sure, maxed our characters were more powerful than the newbies, but anyone could easily get a maxed out character with just a little bit of time and effort, so most people had maxed out characters. The games focus was not on character development, beyond tweaking your template for a given game play change. The focus was on actually playing the game, going to dungeons, finding loot, crafting, and finding resources, socializing, and trading. People did not think of it as a grind game where the primary focus was character development. How you played your character mattered far more, as did customizing your template and equipment for your play style.

Local and Global Chat

I received two more of the x11 books today, so now i have 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8. I heard there wasn't a 7, I don't know if thats true though. Hopefully it will have all the information in it I need to begin programming x11. I am tired of using the buggy default C functions scanf and gets, I heard gets is really bad and you shouldn't use it, but that is no reason to pay any attention until something breaks. There is a problem with them that whenever you run a function before using them, it seems to skip over the input getting step. Hopefully I know enough C syntax to begin programming instead of leaving it entirely up to other people like I was doing before.

But what I really want to discuss is local and global chat. I was reading how in Darkfall there is no local chat. That really changes the social dynamic of the game, making it a less social game. Apparently, most of the chat goes on in guild chat. I think just having global chat is too overwhelming, espeacially since there are more than 8 people on the server. I think that if you are in a large crowd and everything you say has to be directed at every single person, it makes you just want to shut up about some things, because you can't really get to know people as individuals, just what ever they chose to broadcast about themselves. It is like if everyone just read blogs and no one ever used email or instant messageing, you wouldn't really get to know people because when you blog, unless you limit it to friends only, you are broadcasting to the whole internet. Maybe that isn't always such a good thing.

Sometimes things are too personal, and you don't want everyone to know them. For instance, on a pvp server, you don't want every pker in a large area to know that you and a couple other people are going to try and hunt kobolds. Then the pks will come and kill your small band, taking your loot away. It would be better if only you and the couple other people in the area heard it. Then you have a chance of having a successful hunt without the gank squad showing up. Now, there is the possibility that your other party member could try and pk you anyway, but that risk is much lower than if the whole server knows what you are up to.

One possiable way to deal with no local chat is to mostly only have guild chat. Guilds are groups that play together. They could find each
other outside of the game on places such as message forums and websites. The problem is that some players new to the game may not even know about the guilds, or even have an idea of what guild would most fit their play style until playing the game a bit. Also, players may fall out with guilds, or wish to form new ones while in game. If you don't have a local chat, it can be hard to get people to met up and decide if they like playing with the other players enough to want to join the guild. Furthermore, some things make sense to happen outside of guilds. It would be like if you only talked with your family members ever, except when you were blogging or something. It would get hard pretty quickly, since you might end up with the warped way of thinking that your family (or guild) has set up. Seeing other people and talking to them one vs one or on a small group basis can do more to change a persons mind about something rather than hearing everything broadcast over the global channels. I would not want all my personal problems broadcast on live tv for everyone to see. Some people might like that, but I doubt the majority of us would want that to go on.

Housing in single and multi-player rpgs

One of the topics that I think needs to be addressed in a lot of rpgs is this idea of housing. Usually in single player rpgs, you play this adventurer character, who completes quests and stays at various inns in the world, never really having a house of his or her own, or a place to call home. Often, early in the game of the single player rpg, the main character or characters gets sucked out of their own world, kicked out of the town or has their home town destroyed early on. This makes the characters into adventurers of some sort. Even if in the story, the characters have a home, they end up so far away from it trying to solve a problem that has somehow effected their homeland to the degree that they need to leave it to try to solve the problem.

One of the things you can do, however in some single player rpgs, notabley in the Ultima series, is establish a sort of home base if you will. This is a place where the character or party of characters can drop off extra items they have acquired, and they will not decay or be taken away from the characters. The characters can return there later to pick up items they find out they need. Perhaps you should not have picked up those twenty rusty swords in the goblin den, espeacialy considering you only have four party members who each have magic swords, but that little girls hair ribbon that you thought had no use, may be a key plot item you need in order to defeat the evil dragon king. The problem is those torn cushions back in the warlock tower next to the water fall that were used for summoning the demon, later do not have any plot value, but you picked them up anyway, thinking they might be important, but it turns out you don't need them. Therefore, it does turn out having a storage spot comes in handy, when you have so many quest items like that and you are not sure what you need anymore.

Multi player games tend to more often option to offer a sort of home-base, so the characters do not have to live our of their backpacks. But in multi-player games, this is not the only, or even the main reason for housing. A big part of housing in multi-player involves inviting your friends over to show them all the cool stuff you collected on your adventures. It also offers a place to train your characters, hold in game events, meet up before that big dungeon trip, or any number of other reasons players can think of for characters to socialize.

These are, of course, in addition to the home base sort of feeling that housing gives to the characters in single player mode. I still remember my time playing serpents isle. There was a house on serpents isle where I ended up leaving extra goblin loot. Their was a chest in the house, and in the basement a naga kept spawning. Even though it had been abandoned and no one was living there for quite some time, I found myself trying to decorate it and make a home for myself out of the place. Another place I espeacily liked, espeacialy in Ultima Nine was Lord Britishes castle. He really knew how to make the avatar feel at home there. In Ultima Nine, I ended up storing all my loot in that one room of the castle. Unfortunately, it got rather cluttered, but that did not prevent the Avatar from falling asleep on the bed and waking up refreshed in the morning, (or night, sometimes the avatar kept some really strange hours)

Crossfire, the original engine that Wograld is currently based on, does have player housing, a feature I feel is a must for a fully imersive rpg. However it needs some great improvements. Given the poor user interface for the game, it is still hard to figure out exactly what needs to be improved, but once that is fixed, features will need to be added, modified (and yes even removed) from the game.

Skill based rpgs vs Class based rpgs

I was discussing last night with our wograld project unix guru last night. She says that she prefers class based rpgs to skill based rpgs. She thinks it is preferable to have classes in games such as mage, cleric, warrior, rogue etc, I on the other hand, prefer skill set based games, where every character can chose different skill sets to make their own templates. The reason I prefer skill sets is that I hate in multi player waiting around to see that you have certain types of characters in order for your party to work such as healer, or tank, or worse yet, a mage or warlock to transport your characters from place to place. I believe that there are certain skills every character should have, rather than to speacilize to much. The skills I believe are essential are healing, and transportation in most games.

She mostly plays single player games such as never winter nights, where you have a party of adventurer to cover the skills you don't have or you simply play the game a certain way based on the class you have, rather than worrying about other players and what skills they have. This maybe biased her against skill based systems, but she believes that applies to real life as well, and that people should speacilize like in doing certain chores around the house. But then I point out, what if someone gets too sick to do the chores anymore. Then the other person doesn't know what to do and the whole places gets messy, the dishes don't get washed or the bills don't get paid. This is why I believe that there are certain things everyone must know regardless of their skills.