30 MA XIMUMPC MAY 200 5
monsters. And once the monsters have
been created, their attacks are fi ne-tuned
to diffi culties appropriate to the level of
the zone. Merchants must be designed,
and their shops stocked with goods
for wayfaring adventurers to purchase.
Quests must be written, and dungeons
must be fi lled. But the excitement for
many MMO players lies not in the grind—
leveling- and gearing-up your character—
but in the challenge of boss encounters.BOSS ENCOUNTERS—
WHAT’S THE BIG
DEAL?
You can play the majority of a game
such as World of Warcraft as if it were
a single-player game that just happens
to be equipped with an excellent chat
client; that is, you can adventure and
level-up either by yourself or in small
groups. Once you reach the higher
levels, you can begin exploring what’s
known as “raid” content. While a group
is just a few people in the game (fi ve
or six, say), a raid party (or raid, for
short) is a group of groups (as many as
72 people, in some games).
Raids come together to
accomplish one simple goal:
to kill ferocious monsters that
would turn a single player
or even a small group into
adventurer jelly.
Figuring out how to
beat each boss encounter
is a puzzle for you and
your friends to solve. Boss
monsters usually have
special skills and attacks,
which can present unique
challenges. While you can
sometimes use a brute-force
approach—simply kill the
boss before he kills everyonein your raid—there’s usually a smarter
way. If, for example, a boss monster is
capable of casting a powerful spell that
damages everyone in close proximity,
the best approach is probably to kill
him from afar, using magic and ranged
weapons. As your raid advances
through the game, the boss encounters
become more complex, involve more
monsters, and generally require more
coordination among your cohorts.
On the developer side, orchestrating
these high-end raid encounters is a
tricky business: Make them too difficult,
and gamers will become frustrated and
angry; make them too easy, and they
won’t be any fun. Building good raid
content is a constant balancing act that
requires lots of testing and tweaking.
The quality of a game’s raid content is
one of the things that will either attract
players to a particular game or run
them off.THE ECONOMICS
OF MMO
So you have a server with enough
people to populate a small town, andthe people are collecting lots of loot
and trading it for the realm’s currency.
Sounds pretty simple, right? After
all, the developer controls how much
everything costs and how much NPC
vendors pay for commodities, right?
Yes, but there’s a kink: Players can also
use items that drop from mobs to create
goods that other players want and need.
The fact that an offi cial currency
exists, and that players can harvest
resources from the world and convert
them into other in-demand resources,
means that many MMO games have
working economies. In fact, bona fi de
economists are studying these simplistic
systems in an effort to better understandTRIVIA: TICKS
Unlike twitch games, MMO
games don’t require constant
communication between the
server and clients; in fact, most
effects are applied only every
few seconds. This time span is
known as a “tick,” and it’s usu-
ally about six seconds in length.The next City of Heroes expansion pits costume-clad superheroes against evil
antagonists in the battle for Paragon City.M M O R P G
MM MM OO RR PP GG
M M O R P G
MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE ROLE PLAYING GAMESËPlayers fed up with
perceived class imbalances
frequently take to the streets
to protest—naked! The fi rst
such protest occurred in
Ultima Online , but we’ve
even seen such activism in
World of Warcraft , as well.TRIVIA:
RESISTANCE