Future of Gaming Prt.3

April 13th, 2008 by Nokill | Posted in Uncategorized |

Well now that we talked about the world and the player itself we are going to move on to something that is already somewhat in development, player to player interaction.
I don’t know if anyone had one of those moments where a player can block a doorway making it impossible to get out, and team killing is not active so you’re trapped in a room? Well I have and its pretty irritating if it happens a lot.
Yes people don’t work well together very often and this is only one of the many examples I could give you regarding this subject.

If you are going to look for the one problem in online games you will always find its the people playing online that are the main problem for online players.
Now this is something you can fix with joining a clan and training actively but the majority only plays the game a few times and then quits because he’s fed up with the other players shouting at him and irritating him.
So in the end even with methods like clan tools and web stats the problem is still not fixed because most people don’t like clans.

Some time ago I came across this article from a guy that worked on the game Shadowrun, yes the big old failure that almost nobody played.
It looked dull and it played like eating soup with a brick wall and it has this ugly Microsoft logo printed on it which makes it even worse.
But there secretly is more behind the game then you would think, because the game’s social system is worked out pretty good compared to the rest.
There are these little tweaks on the message and vote systems that fixes some flaws in the game witch most other games don’t have.
So now you can get kicked yourself if you put in a vote to get rid of a jerk, or you say silly things like poop while your actually trying to say shit, things like that.

Well this is all pretty nice but I don’t think in the end this will cut it.
Games will have to actively reward playing together as a team, and also get systems that will let players help each other with things like climbing walls.
Alright bad example, this has been done a million times already and it has some flaws witch you can see right here.

Mainly I think games like (grabbing the old box again) Call of Duty rewards players really good if they work as a team because its the only good way to win.
But rewarding someone to play with his team and someone actually playing with his team are two completely different things that don’t blend really good.
And I had many experiences with people walking all over the place not working together and getting camped on the spawns by people that do work together.
Now on the bright side you can only camp in the game if you have someone covering your back.

Sow now the big question is how to actually get people to play as a team.
Its not simple and also almost impossible to do, even with the system that will only let people with the same theoretically skill play against each other.
Because systems like that will only make it harder for the good players to get a game because bad players will think “help you have a lot of points I’m not going to play you”, and the good players will have to make new accounts all the time just to get a match.
At least thats what I see happening a lot in games that have similar systems.

My opinion is that this is a extremely hard thing to fix in games, because no player is the same and nobody can be placed in a box with a stamp on his head indicating how good they are or how bad.
Nor can you fix the fact there will always be someone who is better then you and that not everyone knows how to deal with losing a game.
Small tweaks of the social system should in time make the games work better for people but it will never be perfect because the only real way to fix this is to fix the people playing the games.

Games should focus more on creating communities ingame and accept the fact that you can’t please everyone at the same time in the same place.
And maybe in the far future we will have a global system for everything indicating who is who and you could filter games on the players who you would like to play against.
And until that time you can always play single player or go online with some good friends.