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A MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) is an online computer role-playing game in which a large number of players interact with one another in a virtual world. As in all RPGs, players assume the role of a character (traditionally in a fantasy setting) and take control over most of that character's actions. MMORPGs are distinguished from single-player or small multi-player RPGs by the game's persistent world, usually hosted by the game's publisher, which continues to exist and evolve while the player is away from the game. This results in a gameworld which is far more dynamic, diverse, and realistic than those of other games.

MMORPGs are immensely popular, with several commercial games reporting millions of subscribers. South Korea boasts the highest subscription numbers, with millions of users registered with the more popular games; see list of MMORPGs for a list of the most prominent MMORPGs.

Common Features

Though MMORPGs have evolved considerably, many of them share various characteristics.

• Traditional Dungeons and Dragons style gameplay, including quests, monsters, and loot.
• A system for character development, usually involving levels and experience points (commonly abbreviated as Exp or XP)
• An economy, based on trading of items (such as weapons and armor) and a regular currency.
• Guilds or clans, organizations of players, whether or not the game supports them.
• Game Moderators, in charge of supervising the world.

As most MMORPGs are commercial, like EverQuest and World of Warcraft, players must either purchase the client software for a one-time fee or pay a monthly subscription fee to play. Most major MMORPGs require players do both these things. Some free-of-charge MMORPGs do exist, though their production quality is generally lower compared to "pay-to-play" counterparts.

History

MMORPGs, as we define them today, have existed since the early 1990s. However, they have a history that extends back into the late 1970s.

The First Gameworlds

The beginning of the MMORPG genre can be traced back to text-based Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs, the first of which was developed by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw in 1978. These were gameworlds hosted on private servers (usually at a university, sometimes without the knowledge of the system's administrators) which players would connect to using a telnet client. Gameplay was usually similar to tabletop RPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons; by typing commands into a parser, players would enter a dungeon, fight monsters, gain experience, and acquire loot.

Similar games quickly developed around the same time for the PLATO System. MUDs (and later descendants such as MUSHes and MOOs) were wildly different in implementation from one another, but shared many basic interface elements - for example, a player would usually navigate his or her character around the gameworld by typing in compass directions ("n", "se", etc.)

Many MUDs are still active to this day, and the most influential MMORPG designers such as Raph Koster, Brad McQuaid, Mark Jacobs and Damion Schubert began as MUD developers and/or players.

Early Commercial Development

The first commercial MMORPG (although what constitutes "massive" requires some context when discussing mid-1980s mainframes) was Islands of Kesmai designed by Kelton Flinn and John Taylor. Still text-based, this game became available to consumers in 1984 at the cost of $12.00 per hour via the CompuServe online service.

The first graphical character-based interactive environment, though not actually an RPG, was Club Caribe (first released as Habitat), which was introduced in 1988 by LucasArts for Q-Link customers on their Commodore 64 computers. Users could interact with one another, chat and exchange items. Although very simple, its use of online avatars (already well established off-line by Ultima and other games) and combining chat with graphics was revolutionary for the time. The term avatar for an on-screen player character may have originated at LucasArts as part of the Habitat project.

The first graphical MMORPG was Neverwinter Nights by designer Don Daglow and programmer Cathryn Mataga, which went live on AOL for PC owners in 1991 and ran through 1997. The project was personally championed and green-lighted by AOL President Steve Case. Both Club Caribe and Neverwinter Nights cost $6.00 per hour to play.

During the early-1990s, commercial use of the internet was limited by NSFNET acceptable use policies. Consequently, early online games like Neverwinter Nights, GemStone III, Dragon's Gate and Federation II relied upon proprietary services for distribution such as CompuServe, America Online, and GEnie.

Following Neverwinter Nights was The Shadow of Yserbius, a MMORPG within The Sierra Network (TSN) which ran from 1992 through 1996. The game was produced by Joe Ybarra. The Shadow of Yserbius was an hourly service, although it also offered unlimited service for $119.99 per month, until AT&T acquired TSN and rendered it strictly an hourly service.

As the NSFNET restrictions were relaxed, traditional game companies and online services began to deploy games on the internet. The first commercial text-based MMORPG to make this transition from a proprietary network provider (CompuServe, in this case) to the Internet was Legends of Future Past, designed by Jon Radoff and Angela Bull. It was a fantasy roleplaying game featuring an evolving world and professional Game Masters who conducted online events. The game was offered through the Internet for $3.60 per hour in 1992 and ran until 2000.

Access to one unified internet allowed game companies to accumulate truly "massive" playerbases, profit, and popularity.

World-wide MMORPGs

The Realm Online was a successful early internet MMORPG launched by Sierra Online in 1996. It was notable for having fully animated 2D graphics, both in and out of combat - this made it far more accessible to a wide variety of audiences compared to previous games. Still, just like its predecessors, it used Dungeons & Dragons style character levels, and had simple turn-based combat and a basic user interface.

Ultima Online, released in 1997, is credited with popularizing the genre. The game featured a flat monthly subscription fee (first introduced by the 3DO game Meridian 59 in 1996) instead of the hitherto-traditional per-hour plan; the monthly fee has since become the standard for most MMORPGs. This new pricing model has also been seen as the motivation for business to shift from the 'hardcore gamer' audience (who racked up massive fees) towards a broader, more massive market. Meridian 59 and Ultima Online also set the precedent for monthly $10 USD subscriptions, a figure that would later gradually increase across the genre. These were the first games that used and spread the term "massively multiplayer".

Meanwhile, commercial online games were becoming extraordinarily popular in South Korea. Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds, designed by Jake Song, began commercial service in 1996 and eventually gained over one million subscribers. Song's next game, Lineage (1998), was an even bigger success. Lineage reached millions of subscribers in Korea and Taiwan, and gave developer NCsoft the strength to gain a foothold in the global MMORPG market for the next few years.

Launched in March 1999 by Verant Interactive and later acquired by Sony Online Entertainment, EverQuest drove fantasy MMORPGs into the Western mainstream. It was the most commercially successful MMORPG in the United States for five years and was the basis for ten expansions (as of December, 2005) and several derivative games. TIME magazine and other non-gaming press featured stories on EverQuest, often focusing on the controversies and social questions inspired by its popularity. Asheron's Call launched later in the year and was another hit, rounding out what is sometimes called the original "big three" of the late 1990s (Ultima Online, EverQuest and Asheron's Call). Yet another fantasy game, Asheron's Call at least featured an original universe; the world of EverQuest was heavily influenced by D&D, and Ultima Online took place in the same universe as several other Ultima games . The future continued to look bright as Origin Systems revealed it had begun developing Ultima Online 2.

MMORPGs in the new millennium

By the turn of the century the concept of massively multiplayer online games expanded into new video game genres. Many of these games, such as the massively multiplayer online first-person shooter World War II Online (2001) brought some of the RPG heritage with them.

For fans of the genre, 2000 was a relatively quiet year, but developers and investors were buzzing to jump into the continually expanding market. Dark Age of Camelot was launched in early 2001 and can be seen as the first successful fantasy MMORPG of the 21st century. It launched smoothly, required less time to gain levels and had an integrated player versus player combat system. Critics dismissed the sci-fi MMORPG Anarchy Online while it suffered through its rough first month in June 2001. Growth of the 'big three' nearly plateaued during 2001 and Ultima Online 2 was cancelled while still in development, indicating that the market had possibly been saturated.

Released in 2002, Final Fantasy XI, an online "sequel" to the long running single-player console RPG series, became the first major console MMORPG, as well as the first online game capable of supporting games and servers shared by both console and PC users. Its practice of randomly selecting servers for new player-characters all over the world was controversial and criticized, but resulted (intentionally in fact) in game worlds in which the players regularly spoke different languages. Also released in 2002, the sprite-based Ragnarok Online, produced by Korean company Gravity Corporation, took Asia by storm, as Lineage had done. Gravity once claimed that there were 17 million subscribers of the game, though this number may not be entirely reliable.

May 2003 saw the release of Eve Online, the first MMORPG released by Iceland-based developer Crowd Control Productions (CCP). Eve Online distinguished itself by placing all players in a single world without 'sharding' the servers to distribute player load. Based in a fictional galaxy 24,000 years in the future, Eve Online drew a small but loyal fan base that has grown over time. According to the game's website, the user base for Eve Online has broken the 100k mark, and the game continues to break its own Peak Concurrent User (PCU) record, which stands at 23,811 as of 26 February 2006 .

In November 2004, Sony Online Entertainment expected to dominate the market when they released the sequel to their phenomonally successful EverQuest, EverQuest II. To keep from competing with themselves, Sony began to offer a flat monthly rate to play all Sony MMORPGs such as EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, and the new EverQuest II. However, much of Sony's potential customer base was drawn to Blizzard Entertainment's World of WarCraft (WoW), released in that same month. At present, WoW is one of the most played games in North America, and one of the most played American MMORPGs, with a total of over 6 million customers worldwide. With the release of these newer games, subscriptions began to decline for old games, such as Lineage II and EverQuest 1.

The release of Guild Wars in April 2005 represented NCsoft's investment in the possible profitability of an online RPG with a one-time fee. Guild Wars did not share many of the distinguishing features of typical MMORPGs such as the massive persistent game world, the subscription fee, the large time investment required to play, and the largely server-dependent software architecture and as such was termed a Competitive Online Role-Playing Game (CORPG) by the developers.

Another Korean MMORPG, MapleStory, a side-scroller developed by Wizet, likewise contains free gameplay. However, it covers its costs through purchasable game "enhancements". Due to its free nature, the game is said to have more than 30 million players in all of its many versions, with the majority of them from East Asia.

On August 4, 2005, the Chinese government announced a ban on all "violent" gameplay for minors under 18. Chinese officials defined 'violent' as any game that involves player vs. player combat, a common feature among MMORPGs. Later in August the same year, the Chinese government imposed online gaming curbs so players will gain experience and items in game at a decreased and decreasing rate, until it hits zero after five hours of consecutive gameplay, after which the player must log off for five hours to get the full rate back.

Academic attention

MMORPGs have begun to attract significant academic attention, notably in the fields of economics and psychology. Edward Castronova specializes in the study of virtual worlds (MUDs, MMOGs, and similar concepts). Most of his writings, including "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier" (2001), have examined relationships between real world economies and synthetic economies.

With the growing popularity of the genre, a growing number of psychologists and sociologists study the actions and interactions of the players in such games. One of the more famous of these researchers is Sherry Turkle. Another researcher is Nick Yee who has surveyed more than 35,000 MMORPG players over the past few years, focusing on psychological and sociological aspects of these games. His research can be found at The Daedalus Project.

Independent development

Many small teams of programmers and artists have tried to create their own MMORPGs. The average MMORPG project takes three to four years and large investments of money to create. Independent development, or game development not run by any company, usually takes longer due to lack of developer's time, manpower or money. Additionally, the long-term lack of funding required for running MMORPG servers may lead to the abandonment of the project.

Sometimes these independent games are free-to-play, but will confer in-game privileges to paying customers.

The best-established independent projects are AWplanet, Daimonin, Endless Online and Planeshift. Daimonin and Planeshift are entirely open source. The developers of Endless Online have released technical development information with details about their coding.

The WorldForge project has been active since 1998 and formed a community of independent developers who are working on creating framework for a number of open-source MMORPGs.

Browser-based MMORPGs

With the success of the MMORPG genre in recent years, several multiplayer games played in web browsers have also begun using the MMORPG moniker. This largely text-based sub-genre developed from old BBS games and pre-dates the modern idea of an MMORPG. Browser-based MMORPGs are usually simpler games than their stand-alone counterparts, typically involving turn-based play and simple strategies (e.g. "build a large army, then attack other players for gold"), though there are many interesting variations on the popular themes to be found. Many of these games are more like turn-based strategy games or wargames than role-playing games. In Planetarion players control planets and fleets of ships; in Kings of Chaos the player commands an army rather than a single player character. In Pardus, the player controls a character who owns a spaceship and gains experience points through trading or fighting, in a way similar to the classic game Elite.

One of the earliest examples of a browser-based MMORPG is Archmage, which dates back to early 1999. Currently, an extremely popular browser-based MMORPG, Kings of Chaos, boasts a player population numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Its popularity is primarily fuelled by a reciprocal link clicking system where users give each other more soldiers by clicking on their friends' unique links, taking advantage of the small world phenomenon to spread word of the game across the world. Some examples of click based MMORPG's are Legend of the Green Dragon and World of Phaos, whose code is open source, allowing anyone to create their own game server. Another browser-based MMORPG, Kingdom of Loathing, largely parodies other games. Some of the more popular of these have become profitable through user subscriptions.

Not all browser-based MMORPGs are turn-based text games. More recently, faster computers and the Java programming language have allowed the introduction of graphical browser-based MMORPGs such as RuneScape, produced by Jagex, which are more similar to standalone MMORPGs.

Genre challenges

Most MMORPGs require significant development resources to overcome the logistical hurdles associated with such large production efforts. Online games require virtual worlds, significant hardware requirements (e.g., servers and bandwidth), and dedicated support staff. Despite the efforts of developers cognizant of these issues, reviewers often cite non-optimal populations (such as overcrowding or under-populated worlds), lag, and poor support as problems of games in this genre. These problems tend to be worse for free MMORPGs. Peer-to-peer MMORPGs could theoretically scale better because peers share the resource load, but practical issues such as asymmetrical network bandwidth and CPU-hungry rendering engines make peer to peer MMORPGs a difficult proposition. Additionally, they become vulnerable to other problems such as cheating.

Several MMORPGs have suffered through technical difficulties through the first few days (or weeks) after launch. Early successes such as Ultima Online and EverQuest managed to pass through this stage with little permanent damage. Few games may have significant failures, leading ultimately to their demise, if they launch too early and contain frequent bug fixes, downtime, or structural game changes that may discourage players from continuing to play the game. Due to these problems, games such as Anarchy Online and World War II Online struggled to regain good press after their first month, and gained good press after stabilizing their servers. Dark Age of Camelot and City of Heroes showed hardly any signs of such difficulties.

Cheating

Cheating is a major challenge for the game developers, as it is done in many ways. Exploiting is a form of cheating involving the use of a flaw in the game mechanics to gain unfair advantage. Depending on the nature of the exploit, game developers can fix the exploits within hours or even minutes through patches and updates, although some holes last weeks or months before they are detected or reported. Even when fixed, exploiting can still be an issue, as exploiters may still have the advantage they gained before the patch was released. Depending on the seriousness of the exploit, a rollback may be needed just to counter the effects the exploits had.

External or 3rd party programs are another type of cheat. They can be used to automate legitimate actions that were intended to be accomplished by the users themselves, often with such efficiency that it provides a huge advantage. Botting is a term for a player using a script that could automate progress through the game without them actually playing the game for themselves. This could be done through a simple macro program which records keystrokes and mouse movements, or scripting program that could make “smart” keystrokes, such as AC Tools. Farmers, if they are unable to exploit loop holes in the game, will use such methods to harvest materials or gold from the game world right around the clock.

Requiring a little more talent on the cheaters part, along with some rudimentry social engineering, some third party programs are released with code in them to capture and relay account details back to the author, enabling them to steal virtual possesions from the account or impersonate the rightful owner to perpetrate confidence tricks and other scams. These trojans often masquerade as a free utility to help with some common game related task such as character template design. Even more subtle methods are known to be used to gain an edge, and these require the most skill as they can be hard to detect. Depending on the way the game handles certain aspects of gameplay the client or components thereof can be modified, either on disk, directly in memory or on the wire as data passes between the client and server. All the while the server does not verify the veracity of client data or, ideally, take care of important calculations server-side, this can be used to modify values such as character health or armour, speed up movement or subtly change other non-trivial aspects of the game to the cheater's advantage. There are programs that have been designed to prevent external programs from running during a game, such as GameGuard. The integrity of client files can also be checked each time you load the game, although of course some gamers have found ways to bypass or disable these protection programs.

Private servers

Single-client based graphic MMORPGs may have private servers or server emulators. Private servers are mostly run by volunteers, therefore most of them are free. However, some private servers may wish for people to donate money, sometimes in exchange for a bonus in the game. Private servers remain markedly less popular than the official servers, with player numbers in the hundreds, not thousands. EQEmu is a server emulator for EverQuest, others exist for World of Warcraft, Lineage II, Ultima Online, and many other MMORPGs.

In China as well as many other Asian countries the use of private servers is more prevalent. Most Chinese MMORPG players are aware of the existence of private servers, and according to statistics more people prefer private servers than official servers. The reasons for this are the relatively high fees for official servers and the availability of 100MB/s fiber optic internet connections, which can be as cheap as US$30 a month. As a result, the costs of running a server in China are remarkably low. In one instance, a private server had more than 50 000 players registered. Some even have 1000 accounts in 1 day (the opening day). Among such cases are Mu Online which is one of the most popular private server games in the world, with over thousands of private servers. Private servers have significantly damaged the commercial MMORPG development. Many gamers in China feel the companies that developed MMORPGs purposefully made the leveling progress advance slowly so more money could be made off the gamers. Most of the private servers have placed a faster experience rate, allowing players to progress through the game faster than on retail servers.

See also

• Computer role-playing game
• List of MMORPGs
• MMORPG terms and acronyms
• MMOFPS
• XORG (MMORPG/FPS)
• MUD
• Online wedding
• Virtual crime
• Virtual economy
• Avatar
• Browser game
• List of Text-Based MMORPGs

References

• Ferrell, Keith. (November 1987) "The Future Of Computer Games: Ten Industry Leaders Speak Out". COMPUTE!
• Kent, Steven (September 23, 2003). "Alternate Reality: The history of massively multiplayer online games". GameSpy.
• Bartle, Richard A. (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. Indianapolis: New Riders. ISBN 0-1310-1816-7.
• "Massively Money-Eating Online Games" (October, 2005) PC Gamer 12 (10), p.28

External links

• MMOGChart.com - Bruce Woodcock's analysis of MMOG subscription counts based on figures reported by the games' developers.
• MMO Markets - Philip Dhingra's tracking of the virtual economy
• Wage Slaves - 1UP.COM article on farming.
• The Daedalus Project - Nick Yee's ongoing survey study of MMORPG players. Demographics, narratives and essays.
• Massively Multiplayer Online Games - A set of articles posted at Gamespy.com, concerning the past, present, and future of the genre.

• Computer and video game genres
• Massively multiplayer online role-playing games