before they have a chance to really become familiar with the game, one needs to look
only as far as the history of the online combat flight simulator market. These are some
of the oldest online combat games, and seem to be ideally suited to multi-player gam-
ing. But the community never grew beyond the super-hard-core flight simulator buffs.
One reason for this was that the controls for these flight simulators were so challenging
to learn and the physics so difficult to wrap your head around that most players had
trouble even keeping their planes in the air for very long. Throw in seasoned players
who showed no mercy in taking out these newbies, and you have a market that never
extended beyond a certain limited size. In the end, the games were simply too unforgiv-
ing toward new players.
To make matters worse for newbies, it is a rule of thumb in online game develop-
ment that some fixed percentage of players, say one percent, are complete jerks (or at
least become jerks when playing online games) and love to prey on new players who do
not stand a chance against them. Though this may only be one percent of your audience,
unfortunately they are typically the most tenacious and tireless of players. Many of the
multi-player combat games have tried to partially solve this problem by including sin-
gle-player training areas in their games.Ultima Online, the first commercially
successful massively multi-player game, was particularly plagued with player-killers
when it launched. This despite the fact that the game, unlike death-match style games,
was not designed to emphasize players killing other players. To many players this
resulted in a significant barrier for entry. Almost all subsequent MMPs fixed this prob-
lem in various ways. One solution requires player-killers to register as such and then
allows them to only attack other player-killers. Another technique involves segregat-
ing new players in safe zones for a time before allowing them to go to more hostile
locations. Indeed, evenUltima Onlineeventually fixed the problem by creating a mirror
of the world that was safe and then allowing the players who were looking for a less hos-
tile environment to migrate over to it.
Protecting newbies is a concern online game designers will always need to
deal with and for which there will probably never be a perfect solution. As I mentioned
Chapter 13: Multi-Player 247
The originalUltima
Onlinehad many hostile
users known as “player-
killers” who made the
game especially
challenging for newer
players.