Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO)

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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I wanted to focus on the first half of the MMORPG acronym, and perhaps leave the second half for a separate discussion.

What does it take for an online game to be massively multiplayer? I think it refers to two things:

  • The size of the open world and the nature of boundaries between open world zones.
  • The size of the population sharing and competing for resources in those open world zones.

Boundaries
When you enter an instance (raid or dungeon or BG) you leave the open world MMO game and enter into a much, much smaller world MO game. This is not to say instanced content does not belong in WoW, but it does highlight a critical difference between MMO and MO that a lot of people miss – the importance of the open world.

Likewise, when you move from zone to zone – for example, cross the bridge from Elwynn Forest to Westfall – the nature of your transition is important. To be truly massive, the transition needs to be seamless. No loading screens, no pauses, no mobs or mining nodes or other players suddenly spawning into view when they should have been visible from the other side of the bridge and if you happen to walk backwards across the bridge none of these things disappear from view except when you’ve crossed the normal view distance boundaries that have been set up in your graphics settings.

WoW was, arguably, the first MMO that did this stuff very well back in 2004. It’s main competition generally had hard loading-screen boundaries between open world zones, much like we have between Eastern Plaguelands and Ghostlands right now.

Resource Sharing and Competition, Large Populations
When you go out into a massive world and share it with a very large population of people online at the same time as you, what might at first seem counter-intuitive is the fact that the massiveness of the world needs a relative scarcity of resources.

Resource abundance and scarcity is a relative thing. It’s a combination of the number of mobs and gathering nodes out there, their respawn timers, the loot tables for them, and the rules regarding the sharing of loot drops between members of the same faction or the same party. All of these things are pretty easily changed/tuned/tweaked on the fly for any MMO, and the balance is not an easy thing to achieve. It is more of an art than a science, and everyone has their own opinion of the optimal mix.

How something like sharding affects these things
Given the above, I think it’s clear that sharding affects both of the things above in a way that makes an open-world MMO into more like an instanced MO.

If you can hop between shards by dropping from one party and joining another, you don’t even have to cross a zone boundary for mobs and gathering nodes to suddenly appear or disappear right in front of you. If a zone suddenly hits a population limit and automatically shards itself from 1 unified shards into 3 shards then all of the mobs and gathering nodes and their associated respawn timers have just tripled and the abundance/scarcity of those shared resources has spiked upward towards abundance.

Going from a sharded zone to another sharded zone, or from a sharded zone to an unsharded zone, or from an unsharded zone to a sharded zone – these will all result in a high probability of a disruptive transition across the zone boundary that kills immersion. It won’t quite be as bad as going from Eastern Plaguelands to Ghostlands, but it is certainly less-MMO-ish than the experience of going from unsharded-to-unsharded zone was up until they introduced the combination of CRZ and sharding.

The other important thing is the ability to create a huge MMO event, such as a 300 v 300 PvP brawl in the open world like in Hillsbrad. Sharding for server stability purposes has already shown itself to be unfriendly to such organized events. I think in some cases it might be treated with a heavy-handed approach they use for denial-of-service attacks, since the weak cloud-based server infrastructures are vulnerable to such techniques.

I don’t know where we’ll end up. I’m not optimistic that they’ll be able to capture the MMO “feel” from Vanilla because they are limited by – perhaps a little ironically – modern server infrastructure technologies that are optimized for a different kind of game (i.e. MO instead of MMO).

I hope I’m wrong about that.

Have I missed anything critical in what makes a MMO massive?

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The infastructure could be completely stock and it still wouldn’t capture the feel of Vanilla.
1.12 is basically Burning Crusade without the ability to go to Outland. I wouldn’t be surprised if a week or two after Classic launches there’s videos of guys that glitched past the gate exploring an enemy-less Outland (maybe even Outland with enemies) or Silvermoon

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Yeah. There’s really no stopping players from killing the “feel” of Vanilla by choosing to do stuff like this, whatever Blizzard does with the coding or server infrastructure.

For example, I picture a not small amount of people spending most of their time inside of dungeons, raids, and BG’s, instanced away from the massive open world even if the boundaries between zones are (more or less) as seamless as they were in Vanilla. They might even hang out in capital cities begging for a warlock or summoning stone portal rather than making their own way to the entrance of the instance.

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I’m hoping they utilize more traditional server structure, since amazingly it was able to handle what the game can’t handle anymore. The lag fps problems were issues of individual players’ computers that couldn’t handle so many things on the screen. But imagine if someone in 2005 was using a computer made in 2019. That newer computer would easily handle what’s going on on the screen.

So we get the best of both words. We get servers that can handle the extra load, and rely on the fact that a world (textures, models, animations, etc) that was designed for 10-15 years ago will play far better on modern technology.

So what purpose does sharding serve? As Ion said…it’s being used because they think a large number of players will try out Classic and then leave. So they want to be able to drastically increase the server caps, shard the starting areas, so they don’t end up with dead servers. I understand where they’re coming from, but I still think they can find a better solution.

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/shrug People would complain about multi tag mobs, dynamic spawns or server mergers just as much.

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What are the chances, at this stage, that they change this aspect of Classic? It seemed to me to be the centerpiece of their plan to simulate/emulate Vanilla on the BfA server structure. In fact I think during the Blizzcon announcement they spun it as an improvement over Vanilla.

I think they know that the BfA server structure is sub-optimal for Vanilla, which is why sharding seems necessary at the start, but that at this point it’s probably a necessary evil, since it’s either that or nothing at all.

I’m split on multi-tag mobs, since single-tap mobs are immersion-breaking for me. It doesn’t make sense that someone can go out, tap a bunch of mobs and kite them to you, you get them down and they get the experience and the loot – and the skin, in some cases. Never liked that about WoW.

Of course, loot sharing for multi-tap mobs seems to simply give everyone the same amount of loot from the mob, which makes the mob give that much more “resources” (haha) than it would for a single-tap mob. I forget how the experience and loot distribution works for mobs downed by a party in Vanilla. Is it multiplicative or does it divide?

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They would complain way more, considering those options actually disrupts gameplay on top of not actually fixing the problem they are trying to fix in the first place. They aren’t trying to fix the speed of how fast someone levels they are trying to make it so the servers don’t crash and roll back.

Server mergers does the exact same negative things the sharding does but it does it on a much larger scale.

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This is important, I think. While certainly sharding in the starting zones will increase the average leveling speed if the areas are crowded (relative to what it would be without sharding), that’s not the reason they’re doing it.

Hopefully the server infrastructure is stable enough to not require sharding beyond the initial launch spike in starter zone populations, and can somehow tolerate a 300 v 300 PvP brawl in Hillsbrad, for example, without crashing the server and banning the organizers for a DoS attack…

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Assuming you were in the same group, experience and gold were split. Loot went to whoever got to the mob first.

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Ah, that’s a good rule. Nowadays with personal loot the multi-tap mobs are hemorrhaging the lewts left and right!

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It was pretty relevant in vanilla since a good portion of your income actually came from grey/white items while leveling. So you could easily lose a chunk of loot if you were grouped and you were ranged.

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The modern server hardware and infrastructure they have now is vastly superior to what they used in Vanilla. Unless of course, you don’t believe the words of the Classic developers.

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I’m sure it’s vastly superior in some limited ways, but BfA is not designed in a way that encourages the MMO-ish things described in my OP. It seems to encourage, in many ways, people to spend most of their time inside instances. Where it encourages us out into the open world, on the other hand, it throws in things like flying, flightmaster whistles, fast-cooldown hearthstones, portals, and a ton of noncompetitive open-world actions that completely destroy any sense of resource scarcity in the world.

That is, the server structure may very well be vastly superior for what BfA has become. Further, I think people like Ion and the other devs believe that what BfA has become is better than Vanilla WoW, and they may or may not value the MMO over the MO in the sense I’m describing. I think they’ve been so deep into tuning raids and dungeons and M+ e-sports content that they really desire to turn WoW into something more like Overwatch than into what Vanilla was back in the day. (TBH I can’t blame them, given the success of Overwatch and a desire to reproduce it.)

Arguably the only thing they’ve done to get people out into the open world is warmode, and that relies heavily on sharding and CRZ tech.

At this point I’m not sure if I’m ready to embrace a true MMO-ish environment if it’s actually built for us on whatever server infrastructure they use, or if I’ve been converted into more of a MO-ish guy through the conditioning of the past 5 or 6 expacs. If they give me back the seamless-transitions massive open world, will I enjoy it and get out there, or will I just hang out in Stormwind and ask to join groups and hope for a warlock summon so I don’t have to hoof it to the instance entrance?

As much as I think I want Classic to be MMO-ish and get me out into the open world, I haven’t even turned warmode on a single time in BfA…

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Leveling took longer in vanilla but in all fairness once you hit 60 you basically just sat in a city looking for dungeons or waiting for your raid to start or at the battle masters.

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So the impetus for getting out into the world at that point was generated by the players themselves – guilds raiding the opposing faction’s capital city, RP folks, plus probably people gathering herbs/ore/skins/etc. to get some gold or whatnot?

What about world bosses, rare-spawn elites, etc.? What other things got you out into the open world after leveling?

(FYI I’m a Wrath baby so we already had daily quests by the time I had my first max level toon. That only got me out there until the rep grind was done, which is consistent with how BfA is going for me…)

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Farming scourgestones for AD rep was easily the biggest thing I did outside of 5mans.

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One needed to farm rep for recipes, gear, attunements for raids, some enchants were locked behind reps and drops. Pots were more of a necessity in vanilla so you needed to either farm mats or gold to buy them. Alliance had the wintersaber rep which would take quite some time to get the mount. There were special alchemy stations/forges you had to take a dungeon group to clear to if you wanted specific stuff crafted

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1.12 is not Vanilla, that’s what I meant. It’s the BC pre-patch hence there even being a Outland/Silvermoon for people to possibly glitch into (there won’t be a Northrend)
You cannot get the Vanilla experience with the patch they’re using, most of the wacky antics we remember and watch in old videos had been patched out by that point and a lot of what wasn’t patched will be patched out now as “unintended”.
Multiple Windfury procs (Making Enhancement Shamans scary in pvp) would be an example of the former and kiting Lord Kazzak into Stormwind or Blind being reset by Preparation (which allowed the infamous naked Rogues) will likely be an example of the latter.

1.12 isn’t “Vanilla”

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Sure it is, patches 2.0-2.0.3 are the pre patches, 1.12 was very much Vanilla.

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Uhhh yeah it is. Class Faction restrictions? Check. No flying? Check. Specs for only 1 type of gameplay? Check.