A persistent problem

[FoamBats4All]

Sewer rabbit.
Mugsy the delinquent hin mugger.

Those are persistent problems.

Too true. These need to be made generic or something.

[shad0wfax]

Sewer rabbit.
Mugsy the delinquent hin mugger.

Those are persistent problems.

Too true. These need to be made generic or something.

Agreed. I'll do my best to work more in the toolset and change these quests to a more variable and dynamic nature. Different critters, different reasons to catch them, different locations to do things, and in general, a quest revamp would do BG some good.

[Zelknolf]

I'm somewhat curious if the use of names in static quests has damaged immersion worse than the more-core features of our environment before.

"Man, those goblins breed like rabbits. By which I mean they seem to be able to recover from any loss in about 4 hours."
vs.
"Man, Mugsy is a really common hin name. Is there someone important named Mugsy in the hin world or something?"

In my own observations, people seem to crack a mostly-meta joke about it and then get right back to roleplaying.

[Duck One]

Not saying I agree, but as a devil's advocate, lets say you are 100% correct. What would you have us do other than shut down servers? I've seen that Idea, and I don't think that is one anyone is willing to deal with.

I am working on my response, taking my time to compose my thoughts, but I intend to respond.

[Duck One]

I don't really understand your wants, Duck.
The only thing I can think of from what you said is that it would be nice if we had auto travel (By means of Caravans/ships/whatever) to more places to help players congregate.
Which is fine and nice and might be helpful. But alright, what else?

Now while I don't mind the comparison to WOW, it doesn't irritate me, but I do have to say I don't want to play WOW, if I did, I would have. So I don't understand what you want to achieve by comparing ALFA to it.
I mean, yes, it's more popular but... we're not WOW and we don't want to be WOW, so...

I think ALFA is great. Even the people that annoy me are fun to RP with (Ith, how I loath you! ) and are usually good gaming partners.
I think the main issue as I see it (and as I feel from my own experience) is that we are getting older and have less time to spend on our hobby. I can't find something inherentaly wrong with the way ALFA is, and something that would make it better in a blink of an eye.

Maybe i'm missing something but I just can't seem to understand what it is ALFA needs to be/become/have in order to address your needs (And maybe the needs of players in general).

Comparing ALFA to WOW was done so on a limited basis to illustrate that designing a persistent world, even for the pros, proved to be an exercise of trial and error, and having to rework some of the fundamental assumptions of the world to respond to the needs of the players.

ALFA shouldn't be getting older. We should encourage new young players to inject life.

I am going to put in a longer post that reviews some of the policies of ALFA to answer your last question.

[Duck One]

I sort of hear what you're saying/where you're coming from Duck, but... there seems to be an underlying assumption in your posts that a 'persistent' place looks like an MMO in the sense there are plenty of things to do/activity anytime someone feels the urge to log in. If that's the definition, then ALFA definitely can be shored up in terms of persistency.

However, I don't think all of us view persistency in those terms. A working definition of persistency for me means things like if you logged off dead, you log back in dead. If you killed an NPC clearly named John Snowe, he won't pop up again the next time someone logs in. i.e. the world and the overarching story/narrative of that world is consistent, things have consequences that aren't overturned by a server reboot, dead things stay dead, there are repercussions for one's actions, NPCs have lives and feelings and goals and do things when PCs aren't around/logged in, etc. and our SYSTEMS AND RULESET support this idea of persistency quite well (a few notable exceptions like level drain/disease/poison)

In that sense ALFA does have persistency, regardless of whether 30 players logged in today and 5 dm's ran a half dozen plots and people engaged with 31 flavors of perfectly crafted static quests, or 2 players logged in and didn't do much beyond deliver mail. In fact, we are far more persistent than most other PWs and MMOs where you can simply relog and regain all your spells abilities instantly and be cured of all ills, respawn from death for the 50th time by hitting a button, or where there's little rhyme or reason to combat beyond farming the same mobs repeatedly for xp/loot (actually we're rather lenient in that we do allow some lattitude MMO style glossed over/handwaved, i.e. the same boss mob for static X gets killed for the 100th time, it must've been his brother/cousin/lieutenant next in line!). That's the definition I've viewed as our primary objective, narrative consistency/permanence/consequences, and what matters the most to me. It's why I vehemently hate retcons and to a lesser extent dislike comic book time.

Would it be nice if we did have more 'persistency' in the first sense, i.e. lots of activity round the clock like an MMO or BGTSCC? Probably, but that to me isn't about persistency, at least the kind that matters more to me. Saying that we don't have persistency loses a good deal of traction/credibility for me. I'd also probably be annoyed hearing such notions if I were someone who spent vast amounts of time/energy coding up systems that are modded from the vanilla game precisely for the purpose of supporting persistency.

TL;DR version: perhaps just semantics but it's a poor/misleading choice of words to describe the problem as one of persistency. Sometimes mislabeling leads to problems/confusion/rage.

Thanks for your thoughts.

The thought that comparing ALFA to an MMO doesn’t fit should bother people more than it does. ALFA was indeed supposed to be an MMORPG, a massively-mulitplayer online role playing game. It was envisioned to be some 129 servers carving up all of Faerun to be one area per server. It was meant to be thousands of players and DM’s online around the clock to offer something in any time zone, any level, any alignment, any race. ALFA has some particular elements that doesn’t agree with popular commercial MMO’s (DM’s, no instances, permadeath, role play focus, adherence to D&D rules), but none of those preclude ALFA from being classified as an MMO.

Regarding “persistency”, you correctly point out that ALFA’s clock and calendar continuously rolls forward; that the players who die stay dead; and that some plots and actions have permanent effects on ALFA’s world. I concur that these are an element of the vision of “persistency” that ALFA was meant to be. I would term this “continuity”, and suggest that is only one part of the overall vision of persistency ALFA envisioned. But it is an important distinction that differentiates ALFA from other offerings.

By the same token, ALFA really hasn’t achieved its vision in this regard either. No matter how many centipedes I smash in Ruquel, the problem never seems to be solved. Doing 12 quests for the captain of the guard including saving the city from significant danger doesn’t seem to have any effect on my reputation, and he still treats me as a perfect stranger. When I log off standing next to my comrade, it is highly unlikely that he’ll be standing there the next time I log in. Players don’t respawn, but NPC’s certainly do, and they never sleep or wander far from where they always are.

I understand why these things are, and those are observations not complaints. We all suspend disbelief and politely role play around these, and its fine. The parts of ALFA that truly “persist” are the ones when DM’s and players form teams and engage in adventure. Those times seem to be original and have continuity, and when they occur they closely resemble true “persistency”. But those occasions are uncommon bordering on rare. So even in this regard I still submit that ALFA is not meeting its goal of being persistent.

[Duck One]

It almost sounds like your problem is more the lack of players online than the persistence of the world itself. In a game where we literally have player-created kingdoms, I don't think there's an argument against persistence. Suggestions to improve it, sure, but ALFA is definitely a PW.

Reduced travel time has been addressed many times, and as Zelknolf said in another thread, it does not help. Maybe it did on WoW. Cool. ALFA is not WoW and never will be. It's a different type of world. We don't have flying space ships. Not everyone can teleport. What we offer is a setting, a persistent world. You can go into it. You can work with it. You can do whatever you want. My characters have burned down buildings, while others have raised kingdoms. You can see the smoking remains of my changes to this persistent world in Sharp Teeth, while others have beautiful and content-filled towns growing up.

Can you provide a list of things you actually want, rather than listing labels? ALFA fits the definition of a PW as far as I'm concerned, though it sounds like you have a vastly different definition. Certainly, WoW would never, ever count as a PW in my book. WoW has to appeal to as many people as they can, because it needs to pay its bills and employees. We fill a very specific niche: a hardcore, permadeath setting. In WoW you leave town and fight mook mobs, then slightly less mooky mobs, and so on and so on in a game-y world. In ALFA you leave town and if your first destination is Cloak Wood, you die horribly, alone and sad. Because in our fantasy setting we're not trying to tailor a game for you. We're trying to tailor a world for you, based on the popular D&D setting of Forgotten Realms.

I think we'd benefit far more by people contributing (in terms of time/DMing/building) or advertising than we would by trying to emulate something we are not and never will be.

We'll never be an exclusive group where DMs have total control, because we're a persistent world. We need at least some sort of cohesive setting. How would we be persistent if Xan dropped a moon on MS but people on BG didn't notice?

We'll never be a game that appeals to all, like WoW, because we're a persistent world. We do not tailor for the player, we instead adjust for the character.

If WoW is our role model then we're really not aiming to be a game that I want to play or contribute to. If I wanted to play WoW, I would play WoW. It does a better job of being WoW than we ever could.

You play ALFA by making interesting stories, and playing a sort of multi-player, multi-DM D&D with a constant and consistent setting. You play WoW by going out and killing shit to get levels and riches so you can kill more shit to get levels and riches. They are not the same game. (Not to say that ALFA doesn't have its fair share of killing shit, that's just not the point of ALFA.)

Another way to look at it: You win WoW by hitting max level as soon as possible, amounting riches, and going on raids. If you die, who cares, you laugh and go raid a different dungeon. You win ALFA by creating interesting stories with your character until you get yourself killed. You win by having your name engraved on a rock outside Rivermoot. You win by building Ruqel. You win by establishing and running Sword's Edge. You win by achieving your character's goals, not your player goals.

I wouldn’t term it as “my problem”, rather the problem I am pointing out, but the reason I point to lack of density as an issue is that it is keeping ALFA from achieving its stated goal of persistency. The less often players and DM’s are coming together, the less often ALFA truly persists. Out of 168 hours in a week across 4 servers, 672 server game hours, how many hours would you estimate this is occurring? Of those hours, how many of them are involving 100% of the players logged in? I don’t have any hard figures in front of me, but I would stunned if it is 10% of the time, and genuinely surprised if it is 5% of the time.

Many of ALFA’s policies and practices seem arise from a presumption that the occurrence of DM driven player parties are commonplace when truly they aren’t. Many of these policies are actively preventing players and DM’s from coming together. This increases player frustration, harms ALFA’s reputation, and makes it hard to attract and retain players. I am indeed composing a list of other suggestions, which I will share soon, but let’s stay focused on this one question for this thread: is ALFA really persisting?

I have no notion of winning a D&D based game. D&D was the first game whose objective was simply to play. DM’s craft a plot, players make choices, dice are rolled, and a result happens. There is no finish line or specific game objective. People play it to live in a moment, and continuously create new moments to live in. I no more seek to win ALFA anymore than I sought to win D&D, as I have no idea what either looks like. I made an ECL 3 svirf for ALFA specifically because I don’t care what level I am or what I accomplish, I simply want to keep finding adventurous moments and live them.

So to respond to you, I would gladly trade the prospect of getting Darhthmec’s name on a rock near Rivermoot for the prospect of logging in with him and getting into serious adventure when I have a couple of free hours to do so.

[Xanthea]

Of course you can win D&D. You win D&D by setting goals for your character that you find meaningful and then accomplishing them.

[Zelknolf]

Can we use the correct terms for things?

Foam has the actual definition of persistence. Persistence-- in gaming, in software, in language-- is a synonym with continuity, though persistence implies constancy and has a connotation of inflexibility. A DM with special exceptions to the rules undermines persistence, because the world is meaningfully but temporarily altered with no in-world explanation for it. A server with constant downtime undermines persistence, because the world just... goes away... for a while. A lack of players in the world makes the game boring, but as long as the world that you logged out of is the world you log back into, it's persistent.

The world of game design and gaming research is rich with the terms and strategies for this discussion. We've got a pretty extreme gamist player who would like changes to our environment to facilitate more gamist play. That makes sense. Player finds a thing fun. Player wants more of the fun thing. You need a world with lots of mechanical challenges and you need to pack lots of people into a tiny space for that kind of interaction (or, at least, if you want to rely on it). It's fine that you want to make a certain kind of play more viable, provided it doesn't go against the other play styles; let's keep in mind that there are also narrativist and simulationist players in ALFA; gamists are a minority, same as the other two minorities, and serving the community means serving pluralism. But this isn't persistence.

This is population, density, activity, and engagement (also, probably, content; this seems to assume that existing content won't be quickly exhausted by a spike in activity; that's probably not realistic). Fine things to seek, but the right words keep us doing the right sort of communication and working on the right things.

[Duck One]

Can we use the correct terms for things?

Sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_world

A persistent world or persistent state world (PSW) is a virtual world which, by the definition by Richard Bartle, "continues to exist and develop internally even when there are no people interacting with it". The term is frequently used in relation to massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and pervasive games.

Does ALFA do that? I would assert that the game effectively comes to a halt when no players are present, and nothing meaningful changes until they log in again. Yes, some module changes happen within the toolset when no players are present, but they are mostly adding or filling in areas, not advancing the plot or evolving the world.

If we’re going to be fair, ALFA really lives in the presence of a DM, and effectively disappears without DM and players. Given ALFA’s present density, I would submit this is somewhat rare, and ALFA is not realistically meeting the above definition.

Mind you, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. ALFA doesn’t need to be a true “persistent world” to have value. But if it isn’t what we are or what we want to be, then let’s visit that upon our policies and charter.

A server with constant downtime undermines persistence, because the world just... goes away... for a while. A lack of players in the world makes the game boring, but as long as the world that you logged out of is the world you log back into, it's persistent.

What is it that you’re hoping to “persist”, a setting or a plot? If I make a TV show that has no characters or plot and only shows shots of an empty set, is it really entertainment? D&D is a fantasy adventure game which centers on adventurous plots. Even if the servers are on but empty, the plots remain beyond the reach of the players, and the only part of your fantasy world that is persisting is the setting.

We've got a pretty extreme gamist player who would like changes to our environment to facilitate more gamist play.

Is that your description of me? Well, thank you for clarifying my motives to me. I’m not really sure what a “gamist” is or how to facilitate the play of such, but if it involves bringing players together more often to make adventure happen more easily, then I guess I am “extreme.” I’m sorry you don’t share that goal.

Removing your characterization of me and my motives from the equation, you need to think about the larger community. What is ALFA’s reputation, and what is keeping it from attracting and retaining players?

[Zelknolf]

Gamists are people who focus on gameplay. Folk who insist that play should be about mechanics and mechanical interactions. In D&D, it's those who demand adventure, want traps and monsters and view play sessions that don't drive toward traps and monsters as wasted. The way you can spot extremist gamists are because they tend to view any criticism of this mindset as "playing the Sims."

This is typically distinguished from Simulationists (for whom a coherent world is priority) or Narrativists (for whom an interesting story arc is priority).


You may be interested in the full context of the Bartle citation; the point reference was to the fact that build is happening on worlds while the world is online. He was writing about MUDs, where build happens through the game client. So, does the world develop, in the sense that Bartle defines in your citation? Yes. Absolutely. ALFA's constantly being built. You can tell, because we're open source and version controlled.

Typically, though, you want to cite Bartle for his taxonomy of players.

[Duck One]

Let me point to Star Wars Galaxies, which at its launch had a fantastic player driven economy which relied upon ever changing resources. They would change the spawn location, attributes, and scarcity of dozens of resources. This would cause farmers (players) to work all new areas to feed the crafters (players). This would mean that control of the planet mean control over access to those resources, which in turn would cause factions (players) to take control of ports and routes to these resources.

They would also introduce new recipes for new items, new customizations, etc, causing all new reasons for things to change. The premise was simple: he who controls the economy controls the universe. With the flip of a few variables, the whole dynamics of the game would change. Players, NPC, plots…it all evolved around these changes. Safe areas became dangerous, and vice versa; irrelevant factions became suddenly relevant, political power would shift causing a response in the populace’s allegiances, minor plots became center line story arc. Players were part of a bigger universe, but not the entire focus of the universe. You really felt like a pawn in a much larger game.

My point? ALFA really truly drives its life through the plots of its DM’s. The modules are mostly a campaign setting for the DM’s to work within. That’s fine; that’s D&D, and I have no issues with it. But when the servers sit empty, there is no life of any meaningful sort, and there is really nothing of substance that persists.

I’m not sure why this is such a sticking point. If ALFA doesn’t really persist, is that so damning? My PnP game never persisted, and it was well worth the time. Acknowledging that ALFA is not persisting doesn’t mean we have to shutter the doors. It may very well be worth every bit of effort that has been poured into it even if it doesn’t meet the goal of persistency.

As for your labels of “gamists, simulationists, narrativists”, I would contend that elements of all three make the game compelling. I am an adventurist (the only one of these words which didn’t trip the spell checker). The formula for this is simple: overcome risk to earn a reward. Before you jump to yet more labels, let me elaborate here, there are many kinds of risks and rewards:

Physical risks (monster, traps, elements) and physical rewards (money, items, estate)
Social risks (reputation) and social rewards (status and stature)
Political risks (factional standing) and political rewards (power and influence)

I could go on: intellectual, economic, religious, the list could be as long as your imagination. You can mix them up, where you take on a physical risk to earn a social reward. I want to play a fantasy adventure game. Adventure involves some kind of risk offering the possibility of some kind of reward, and I would like to share that with others. I’m not sure which “___ist” this really makes me, or how extreme that is, but I would hope it is not too far off from the average D&D player.

[Zelknolf]

So now we have to be the best parts of Pen and Paper, World of Warcraft, and Star Wars Galaxies to be persistent-- and because we fail to live up to this standard, all is lost?

I'm doing my best to engage this with the real information and treat all of these statements in good faith, for surely I will be justly scolded if I again fall to profanity, but every answer gets the goal posts moved or makes the equivocation fallacy deeper. It's very hard to treat this line of discussion as serious still.

So, it's true that our game doesn't have as much dynamic content as Star Wars Galaxies. It's true that we don't hook up the action firehose like World of Warcraft. It's true that we don't dump everything onto DMs and treat this like a setting for isolated campaigns. Our game isn't any of those things.

On the first point, I would say that I'm working on it. Work would go faster with help, but we will make progress regardless.

I'm wearing my fingers to nubs responding to the latter two. It sounds like you're driving toward a dramatic overhaul to turn ALFA into campaign servers-- so, please, just put up a module for a few hours a week and run your campaign on it. We'll miss you, if that would mean not playing on the persistent servers, but if that's where you'll have fun you should do that. If ALFA is better off by that structure, that's the mechanism of change.

[SCI-kick]

Interesting points on this thread.

Although I'd prefer to be called an "action role-player" rather than a "gamist".

[Xanthea]

Yeah, uh, nobody on ALFA is actually a gamist.

There are only narrativists and simulationists who derive differing amounts of enjoyment from adventure RP as opposed to town RP.