[Animats]

MMOs as virtual worlds are really hard. Red Dead Redemption online has all the great graphics, but play is mostly people randomly killing other people. No plot. This is a big problem with MMOs - big working worlds can be built, but mostly people just kill each other. Look at the success of Fortnite - 8 million peak concurrent players.

Second Life has a functional economy, but no NPC ecosystem. The economy is driven by land ownership and fashion. Second Life has landlords, who pay money to Linden Labs for land and get a bulk discount, then rent it out. They have most of the problems of real landlords - collecting rent, handling evictions, dealing with tenant complaints and tenant disputes. Most of the administration of Second Life is handled by landlords. The biggest operations make US$ 6-7 figures this way.

Fashion is a big deal in Second Life. There are designers with followings. Fashion shows. Women are in the majority. This is entirely player based - players are buying from other players. LL takes a cut when converting from Linden dollars to US dollars, but it's under 10%.

Objects in SL have privileges, but not quite like files. The privileges are Copy, Mod, and Transfer. This is key to making the economy work. Owning an item with Copy privilege lets you make more copies, but you can't give them other people. With Transfer privilege alone, you can give or sell the item to others, but can't make more copies. Items like furniture and vehicles are usually Copy, no Transfer, so you can buy one chair and set up a room, but not set up a car dealership. Clothing is usually Transfer, no Copy, so only the owning avatar can wear it, but you can sell it at a rummage sale. Anything which is both Copy and Transfer can be duplicated and sold. All this is server side, so it's hard to break the protection.

SL now has a NPC system, "animesh", but, as is typical for Linden Labs, they just implemented it and gave out a few demo objects. Everything else is up to the users.

SL runs about 40,000 concurrent users, which would place it at about #12 on Steam if it were on there, around where GTA V is on Steam.

[avar]

> This is a big problem with MMOs - big working worlds can be built, but mostly people just kill each other.

This isn't a problem with these games. It's intentional. Everyone knows how to mitigate it, you introduce a factor of significant loss aversion into attacking or being attacked, e.g. what EVE Online has where you might lose significant resources as a result.

Players by an large don't like that, and just want to join multiplayer and shoot and be shot.

The general public multiplayer mode in games like RDR or GTAV is always utter chaos like that, but you can just join private groups where it isn't like that.

I think that's the best of both worlds, you can still die (e.g. accidentally) and respawn quickly, and if you're being a dick the moderator of that session can kick you.

[space_fountain]

Something that a was part of for a long time which I thought had a good mix of this was Civcraft a Minecraft sever/collection of mods.

It made pretty much all resources scarcer and plants and animals harder to grow (biomdepenedent). Then mods allowed users to reinforce blocks meaning it would take repeated breaks for them to actually disappear. (cooked stone meant 25, iron 255 I think and diamond 1255 or similar). Reinforced doors and similar also had permissions associated with them.

Kill other users with a pearl in your hand would trap the player in the end till the pearl de-spawned, you released them, or logged out with it in your inventory. On top of that there were a few other mods, but in my mind it did a remarkably good job of keeping a server with anarchist rules from imploding. I think a lot of it was that Minecraft is a game you can do something other than kill people in.

[ehnto]

My solution was to play modpacks that no sane person would be bothered grinding in order to grief. Svens and Test Pack Please Ignore are what our servers were based on. If you wanted to grief you would uabe to grind for hours before being capable enough to bother anyone.

So in your case and mine it seems the solution was giving serious players tools to defend themselves that were resource or time intensive to defeat, so the griefer wouldn't be bothered.

[space_fountain]

Getting sort of off subject, but one of the things I liked about this set of mods was that they were entirely server side. It got a bit awkward in that it required text commands in the place of interfaces in a lot of places, but it meant that the difficulty of getting people to join was a lot smaller. I think at the peak it was still fairly small but a healthy 100+ on most days.

My first big bit of software development was a mod that ended up getting used on the server and that's still updated by some of the copycat servers that got created after.

[the_gipsy]

Do you happen to know any active copycat servers?

[space_fountain]

Haven't played personally, but https://www.reddit.com/r/civclassics/ seems to stil be kicking.

[the_gipsy]

Civcraft was one of the few games where the economy felt really real, and the gameplay truly emergent.

[ehnto]

I haven't had that much trouble in GTAV. It definitely happens, but it's normally hackers rather than people abiding by the rules.

I think the fact that people have such a grind to get anywhere, and there is so much to do other than grief. Perhaps people sympathize because they are trying to do the same thing. Even though you get rewarded for it, most people don't try and ruin your missions.

It's possible I get matchmade into more polite servers because I never cause trouble. I don't know if they keep track of that. They definitely track it during each individual session.

[ChuckMcM]

Essentially MMOs aren't just one hard problem, they are a collection of hard problems.

There are some excellent game theoretic problems in there, the ecology is just one of them. One of the more interesting experiments in the StarWars universe game was the market economics of things like furs.

What I noticed during my years of WoW playing was that the market functioned very much like the 'in app purchase' market of more casual games. For example you could sell magic reagents which an enchanter could use to level up their skill, this was a quick way for someone to exchange gold for skill points. It created an economic stream for players who could "farm" the correct materials to disenchant to get the most in demand reagents (as I recall Greater Eternal Essence was a big seller).

Success in an MMO is in part a balance of these opportunities where a character can trade time for value.

In the Ultima online case the skins were just worth essentially vendor cash, but without that market force in the middle, the economy tanked. Now if vendors paid less and less for hides as the rate of hides redeemed for cash increased, it would provide a natural limiter on the value of that activity.

A truly successful MMO would provide a way for the MMO owner to tax the activity of the players in a way that generated actual cash for them to pay for servers and developers. Then the game becomes self sustaining.

[Animats]

A truly successful MMO would provide a way for the MMO owner to tax the activity of the players in a way that generated actual cash for them to pay for servers and developers. Then the game becomes self sustaining.

Which is what Second Life does. Land payments support Linden Labs.

There is a new generation of virtual worlds - VRchat, Sansar, Sinespace, and High Fidelity. The last three have numbers of concurrent users well below 100. VRchat had around 10,000 at peak, and is now down to around 5,000. There's also Facebook Spaces, which is a VR interface to Facebook that didn't catch on, and Decentraland, which was an excuse for an initial coin offering and whose blog is down. Those are all holdovers from the VR boom that didn't happen.

The next new technology is Spatial OS, a back-end game engine for really big MMOs and virtual worlds. A few games are just starting to use this. The company behind it is valued at $500M, which means they have to charge so much to use it that big game developers are staying away. You have to run it on Google servers, and they don't publicly disclose the price schedule. It's generally said to be high, though.

[norswap]

Based on this and my own investigation of the tech, I predict Spatial OS is going to tank. Hard.

[nrb]

The resource quality and crafting system in SWG was an absolute masterpiece; I’ve yearned for a game with that amount of depth ever since the combat upgrade patch made it irrelevant.

[Raph_Koster]

I led the design on both games, and SWG was of course the application of a lot of lessons learned from UO.

[nrb]

I was going to mention you by name when I was posting that, thank you sincerely for your hand in UO and SWG!

[gfosco]

Cool to see you on here. UO fan since beta and I still log in from time to time. SWG was also great.

[pull_my_finger]

> In the Ultima online case the skins were just worth essentially vendor cash, but without that market force in the middle, the economy tanked. Now if vendors paid less and less for hides as the rate of hides redeemed for cash increased, it would provide a natural limiter on the value of that activity.

I don't think players were killing the animals for the skins, I think they just indiscriminately mowed over everything for skill gain or just to kill stuff.

[hobo_mark]

> The biggest operations make US$ 6-7 figures this way.

In 2018? And here I thought SL died a decade ago...

[simonebrunozzi]

I tried to build a business on SL back in 2007. Secundavita was a replica of St.Francis’ church in Assisi. Big success, except for the money part.

I ended up finding a job at AWS through second life. Not a bad outcome.

[epse]

How?

[golergka]

You mention RDR as if it was an MMO (which it obviously is not), and omit Eve?

[Rotten194]

How is RDR:Online not an mmo?

[FroshKiller]

A Red Dead Online instance is limited to 30 players and 2 spectators. It's far from massive.

[golergka]

The same way any other session-based multiplayer game, like any Counter-Strike or DOTA or Fortnite are not an MMO. MMO has "massive" in the name, as in "massive amount of players that you can interact with in one game session", and usually implies public spaces that are persistent and can be visited by any player freely.

Although, I must admit, the distinction is much less clear now than it was, say, 10 years ago.

[baby]

This is why I always thought that big penalties in MMOs would be interesting. In Minecraft you have "survival" servers, if you die you can't re-join the server for seven days.

[epse]

That's hardcore mode, but I get your point

[cosarara]

How are objects created in the first place? If I like your object, can I just make another one that looks exactly the same?

[egypturnash]

By using the simple in-game 3D modeller, or by using an external 3D modeller and importing meshes. Plus time writing or adapting scripts in SL's scripting language, if there's any interactivity needed.

It is a similar amount of effort to what goes into making the equivalent object in a 3D game, and if you have the skills and the time, sure, clone other people's stuff, or make your own riffs on them!

[cosarara]

Wouldn't it be possible to rip the mesh of the existing object directly out of the game client's memory? And then import it again as a new (copyable) object.

[hhh]

In the SL world, this is called copybotting.

[Raph_Koster]

That would be because of a tool called CopyBot which came out in 2006.

https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/11/15/copybot/

[Animats]

Yes, but if you try to sell it, that gets noticed, and the copier has DMCA problems.

Also, scripting is entirely server side, so that's not copyable.

[WJW]

Yes, but then you just trade time for gold again. The whole point was to get something without paying the "time" cost.