source posted on UO U.Hall

Interesting


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Am I missing something on the site? I only see eight small paragraphs, no real content or new information.

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You are not missing anything. This was more to promote his new MMO, then to go into detail about what is wrong with the MMO industry today. But that does not invalidate what he says.

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I think your whole post points out the problem, and kind of my point.

To date, dynamic events and happenings in an MMO have all had someone behind the keyboard, running the event.

Why hasn't AI been developed to control mobs and mass numbers of them to perform events the people currently have to run? Why do I need a seer to have an invasion? Why can't the mobs randomly, or based on preset conditions, invade a city and have some way to stop it? Why don't mobs ever migrate to random locations, kill the weaker mobs, and control that area?

Where's the DYNAMIC events? Where's the LIVING part of the virtual world?

It's still people based. And that's the issue - it doesn't have to be.

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The kind of artificial intelligence you are asking for does not even exist in World of Warcraft, the most success MMO ever which rakes in over a billion dollars a year. It would take an army of developers and a lot of money to make some good artificial intelligence for a MMO, something that is not happening in the near future. The immediate solution is to hire people that make up the content. That has worked out quite well, except does not make financial sense to a company because results would be difficult to measure.



The UO subscriber base continued to grow after Everquest was released. The total amount of UO subscribers stopped in mid-2001. Make what of it you will, but Everquest did nothing. In fact, Everquest's growth also started to level off at the same time. Dark Age of Camelot might have had something to do with it.



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I don't know what kind of artificial intelligence you think I'm referring to, but I have to ask....

Have you SEEN any of the demos for TR? I'm honestly curious.

If so, did you see the one where they talked about that NPC's, both good and bad, are constantly struggling to take strategic points regardless of player interaction?

I'm not asking for an AI that can learn to combat every strategic scenario the players can dream up, or that can learn and then eventually devise a way to beat the snot out of every character seconds after logging in - A Big Blue for MMO's.

What I'm asking for is an AI, that at some level, continues to operate with at least the APPEARANCE of intelligence. It attempts to give it the illusion that it's attempting to complete an agenda of it's own. An AI that provides SOME form of continuous conflict to be a part of to make it FEEL like there's a real struggle, a real war, happening.

Tell me - what is the "agenda" of monsters in Wrong? How about the Orcs in Blackrock Spire? Do you ever see any action being done by these NPCS?

Look again at TR. Look at the demos again. The Bane constantly attempt to DO something - take over player bases and strategic points. The DEVELOPERS don't even know what they'll log into when they try to go demo an element of the game.

No MMO to date has done this. I'm not asking for HAL to try to beat me in an MMO, I'm just looking for BETTER AI. And TR seems like it will provide it.

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UO was originally designed with that sort of AI - critters have wants and needs and preferences, and were intended to perform actions to fulfill those wants and needs. The system never got fully implemented, although there are some fascinating artifacts of it in some of the code. It's very, VERY hard to get right in a game like UO, and it's very resource-intensive. Draconi's got some wild ideas up his sleeve, though - anyone go walking across the bridges in the Hedge Maze recently?

E. Jeremy Dalberg
UO Community Coordinator
EA Mythic

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yes, but I got by anyway

I'd be more than satisfied if the townsfolk conversed with me as they used to...

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Yeah that would be nice or if at least they did something other then just stand there or wander aimlessly around. For instance at night they should go to bed..or to the pub. During the day they should actually appearing to be doing something pertaining to their job.

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Personally, I would *looooove* to get the NPC chat back - that was one of my MOST FAVORITEST THINGS EVER. Realistically, though, it's probably a ways down the priority list.



E. Jeremy Dalberg
UO Community Coordinator
EA Mythic

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you just made me very happy ~~ it's ON the LIST!


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Here's Koster talking about it (part 1 of 3) - it's a fascinating read.

E. Jeremy Dalberg
UO Community Coordinator
EA Mythic

One of the posters mentioned something about TR, what is TR? Did I read this right, bringing back the NPC saying hello to you when you say hi to them?

edit:
Oh, Tabula Rasa...just clicked on the hyper link. Doh!

Perhaps something even as simple as a bunch of critters invading a random area or town on a random timer. You never know where they might strike next, and they will have to be driven out by the player base (i.e. kill "x" amount of them). Design it so that if no one takes out the monsters/invaders, they simply stick around until people kill them off. Maybe the longer invaders are allowed to stay in an area the stronger they get and become much harder to root out (entrenching and fortifying their position so to speak). If no one kills them off, more and more places become overrun! In essence the player base will be forced to keep control of towns and areas or they will be taken by evil aligned forces!

I can just see it now! Entire shards overrun with creatures! Players fighting at the walls of the cities in an attempt to keep the armies of evil at bay!

To arms! To arms!

Didn't they do that in UO with the monster sieges/invasions?

I think Garriott is just getting his game some advertisment. I think grinding is a cornerstone in the RPG gameplay. You work hard for your character and when you achieve your goal you are proud of what you have accomplished and are rewarded. Course the developers can make grinding funner but I liked the UO grind style.

After a while grinding gets old and so does raiding. In item based games such as wow all there is to do is grind and then do instances for items for your char and nothing else. No housing, no deco, nothing. Eventually you get wore out from it all.

Stronger AI would be nice. I always thought back to the orc wars where the tribals were introduced. It would be cool if an army of some monsters attacked a town. If players didnt get involved the monsters would continue to move on the neighboring towns, continuing to wreak havoc until players had to get involved. Depending on how many of these monsters killed would result in if the army was pushed back to finally eradicating them for good. This to me sounds like the perfect thing. Most UO players are out to fight monsters to get rich and buy everything they want. And when they get everything they drift farther and farther from UO until a new expansion or even happens. Why not make events a daily thing? I know its difficult coding but just a randomization of a type of monster horde attacking towns works. Of course players will want more motivation than just a nuisance horde attacking a town they never even go to. Give out new items. They don't necessarily have to be fantastic. Everyone knows collecting is a huge deal in UO. (tribal masks in my day)

Precisely! Rather than a one time invasion, it's more of a constant struggle. One place I would like to see overrun is Luna :evil4:.

Luna is attacked by necromancers and chaos dragoons. Luna vendors would loose profits.

Ive always thought what a waste Paladin Island [ Trinsic ] is.I know the Npc's walk about a bit and are there for folk to train with, but I always thought especially when there have been invasions,what a shame they didnt all march to the West Gate to protect the town

it would be nice if instead of getting new items for every invasion we got some kind of pointing count for every monster we killed. The count could even be leveled as to the difficulty of the monster. Then we could go to someone within the town we defended and exchange our points for items. But even then these dont have to be umber items, could even be a defender of Trinsic sash etc, or plate. If we wished we could save up points from all citys over time to hand in at Brit castle for a defender of Sosaria trophy. It would give a reason to go out killing and protecting our towns without it being a need to collect something new at every invasion, as you could slowly save up over time. But the collectables limited, to a few designs, not 10+ to choose from, then after a year or two more could be added whilst others are withdrawn.

We seem to get too large collections IMHO. I would have prefered if when they introduced things like the Zoo, Library etc collections that they introduced far fewer things to collect, then add something new every few months or so, to have so many to choose from immedialty then nothing new is a missed oppotunity to encourage long term play and interest.

Thats a great Idea. Instead of many items to collect and flood the market. Much like points added up from donating to library your points for killing monsters and defending towns can be turned in for various items marking the event. For example trophies marking the begining and ending of the war. Or like you said sashes. But make these items 1 per char. So you can only get them once for each of your character.

Even more perks would be your name engraved on the trophy. So you would be more inclined to keep it. Of course this requires more work from EA but its always fun to talk about stuff like this

now if you wanted to create work with this idea you can take this one step further.
decide what is more likly to attack where, ie Cove gets hit by Orcs, Yew undead, each having there there own grade of points. You can only use the points earned at Cove to spend at the Cove reward system, with perhaps the first 1000s earned entiling you to a defender of Cove coin. The same with each town, points are not tranferable to other towns. To get a defender of Sosaria coin you have to collect a coin from all towns and hand them into someone at Brit castle for 1 Sosaria coin. once you have handed in your coins you are entitled to start collecting your city coins again, so you can only have a max 1 of each at any given time. You could then have a Cove Plate which cost 1000 Cove points + a Cove coin, with this repeated over all cities, then of course theres the defender of Sosaria plates. Then over time other items can be added. That would cause a few programming headaches I guess.