In Step 3: Redefine the Game World, Ryan Dancey, who used to be brand manager for the paper-and-pencil Dungeons & Dragons game, explains that one of the key advantages of such paper-and-pencil games is persistence — which seems like something online games should handle just fine:
The place we stand [and] fight is on persistence. The MMORPGs [Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games] have a big problem with persistence. In effect, they are a write-once, read-many application. That means that the developers spend a lot of time creating an environment for everyone to play in at the same time. If the participants are given the power of persistence, a small group of players (those who play the most, or those who spend the most time figuring out how to manipulate the game game environment) will dominate, and new players, or less active players, will find themselves in a nearly incomprehensible environment.Ultima Online, the first of the modern MMORPG games, tried this strategy, and exposed most of its fail points. It was, at least in the beginning, a fairly persistent world, with a lot of emergent behavior. The idea was that the world would be a living place, and that player actions would have a lot of impact on the world. Unfortunately, what happened rather quickly is that the “game” of beating the world’s limits became more important than the “game” of telling the world’s stories. A small group (as a percentage of the total) of the users constantly found ways to derail the simulation, forcing numerous resets, arbitrary limits, and other top-down control mechanisms, combined with a social-play pattern that made no sense, outside the unique environment of UO itself.
For example, one thing that happened in UO due to persistence was that roaming groups of players would take it on themselves to kill, and keep killing new, low level players. As a result, starting a new PC, (or coming into the game as a new player) became almost intolerable. Every few minutes, for no “story” based reason, the PC would die, and have to go through the mechanics of returning to the game. This tactic became known as “griefing”, that is, the play pattern of deriving fun from making some other player’s life miserable, and it plays a part in virtually all MMORPG experiences to a greater or lesser degree.
Another example was illogical manipulation of the environment. A group of players noticed that a certain kind of monster fed mostly on sheep, but if there were no sheep available, it would feed on other creatures. By playing as a group, they were able to slaughter all the ‘normal’ food for this creature in a given area, and keep the food from successfully “respawning”. The monster, as a result, eventually followed the dictates of its programming and began attacking PC characters. Since the creature in question was a Dragon, and only the very highest level PCs, working as a team, had the ability to fight one and win, this essentially meant that any character, at any time, could suddenly get killed by a threat it was (within the context of the story) not supposed to have to be dealing with. The result? People banded together to try to keep the sheep alive. Woo-hoo! That’s some fun gaming there!
The result was widespread unhappiness — in fact, the result was laying the groundwork for EverQuest, which gave people a lot of what they wanted (massively mulitplayer roleplaying) without a lot of the griefing, at the expense of persistence.
Most of the games that followed UO tried to “learn” from this experience by downplaying the elements of persistence. World of Warcraft is at best “quasi-persistent”. The only in-game effect over which the players have control which has persistence is the creation of certain objects, which can be exchanged between players, or sold for cash, but which cannot be left in the environment for others to find, given to (or used by) NPCs, etc.
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The MMORPG format has a probably unfixable problem with player driven persistence that is inherent to the platform: There is little (if any) human moderation of player actions. If it were possible for a PC to carve its initials on walls, in short order, every carvable surface in the game would be so covered, because all it takes is a small minority of the participants to decide that’s “fun” to translate into mass defacement.Example: Players in World of Warcraft discovered that a highly contagious, and very deadly disease was spread by a monster in a specific dungeon. They also discovered that characters of a certain class & level could become infected with this disease, but could kept alive for long periods by higher level characters with sufficient healing resources. Groups on every server, acting independently but on the same strategy, managed to get an infected character out of the dungeon and back to the major cities of the world, whereupon the disease, which was never designed to be exposed to anyone not in that dungeon, infected all the characters playing in those locations. For several hours, the game became almost unplayable until Blizzard patched the game and removed the exploit.