SWG: Jump to Lightspeed: Capital Ships

I can see three potential good uses for capital ships in SWG:

1. Missions: It would be fun to board a capital ship to accomplish some task for your side. In the same way that Obi-Wan had to find and disable the tractor beam aboard the Death Star in SW:ANH, and that sufficiently burly players can go into the Corellian Corvette dungeon in SWG, some of the things you could do after sneaking onto a capital ship might be:

• assassinate an enemy commander (NPC)
• rescue a captured scientist (NPC)
• extract battle plans from the ship's computer
• disable the ship's shield generator
• obtain passage to a hidden enemy base
• sabotage the ship's engines

2. Flight Operations: A lot of people seem to like the idea of serving aboard a big starship in some official capacity. Usually this seems to mean active duty in one of the following roles:

• Bridge: commanding the ship (Captain)
• Bridge: actually piloting the ship (Helmsman, Navigator)
• Bridge: fire control (Weapons Officer)
• Bridge: other stuff (Communications, Sensors, Shields, Internal Security)
• Engineering: servicing the engines, shields, and weapons (Chief Engineer)
• Gun turret: shooting at enemy starfighters (Gunner, Gunner's Mate)

This kind of gameplay probably owes more to Star Trek than to Star Wars, but it could still be fun to implement somehow in SWG.

3. Carrier Operations: This is all about being a starfighter pilot aboard some big hulking carrier that takes you from one battle to another. As much fun as duking it out one-on-one is likely to be, who wouldn't want to be part of some Midway-sized major furball, with hundreds of fighters buzzing around multiple capital ships unleashing electric death on each other?

Personally, here's what I'd like to see. Every now and then -- maybe once every couple of weeks or so -- two capital ships appear over two different major planets. The announcement goes out: "If you're a starfighter pilot, we need you! Sign aboard our ship now, and we'll take you to the enemy!"

You'll fly to the ship, where you'll emerge on board in a hangar bay (with your ship in your datapad) where you can hang out with your fellow fighter jocks, upgrade your ship's components, or load consumable weapons like missiles and flares. After about 30 minutes you'll get a warning message followed by a "loading" screen... and *BING* your carrier appears some distance away from the other capital ship that also just emerged from hyperspace.

And then it's "all hands to battle stations!" You click on your fighter deed and launch to space to start pounding on the bad guys. Depending on how you do against the enemy fighters, your carrier will take more or less damage. Once either carrier drops below some magic number, it will send out a message that it's bugging out. At that point you'll have something like two or three minutes to break off combat and dock with the carrier.

If you're able to dock in time, you'll return to your hangar bay and be aboard when your carrier returns to the planet from which it picked you up, at which time you'll be ejected in your fighter. (Meanwhile the other carrier, after about ten minutes of mopping up enemy stragglers, will return to its own home planet and eject its own complement of fighter pilots.)

If you don't dock in time, your ship zooms off into hyperspace without you, which could leave you in extremely unfriendly territory indeed.

So is there anyone planning to fly Imperial or Rebel starfighters who wouldn't enjoy this kind of thing?

Player-Defined Organizations

Introduction

Most MMOGs these days offer some form of long-duration and many-person groups. Whether they're called guilds or clans or corps or player associations, most MMOGs now offer some in-game tools offered to support these in-game community institutions.

However, something few MMOGs offer is to allow players themselves to define the forms of these institutions and -- more importantly -- the functional rules by which members advance within them. Instead, player associations are generally free-form and loosely defined aggregations of players, with all power to control the existence of the association held by one player. Players can simply say, "OK, you're the duke, she's a countess, and we're all knights," but basically you're just hoping everyone goes along with this kind of roleplaying because that's the only way it can currently be done.

This works, but I wonder if it's not missing some useful opportunities to make these associations a more active part of gameplay. What if these roles could be defined by players for their organizations? Even better, what if they could also define the rules by which players shift into and out of organizational roles to fit the organization's goals for gameplay?

"Player Organizations" is my name for this more general version of the player association concept. Here's how it could work.

Concept of Operation

Any player would be able to use a template to create a table of organization. You'd be able to specify the number of levels, the number of people allowed at each level (the "span"), and the names of individual levels (and possibly even groups of levels). Then you'd pick (from a predefined list of rules and triggers) the advancement criteria for going up to the next level.

For example, one person might create a T.O. on a military model: one Field Marshal [Army] who gives orders to two Generals [Brigade], each of whom gives orders to two Colonels [Regiment], each of whom gives orders to four Captains [Company], each of whom gives orders to two Lieutenants [Platoon], each of whom gives orders to four Sergeants [Squad], each of whom gives orders to eight Soldiers. That would give you an organization capable of holding 1207 people -- more than enough for most purposes, I'd think. If you needed more (and if you're the Field Marshal), you could always change the organizational definition to extend the span at one or more levels.

Rules of Advancement

In addition to the names of the ranks, the designer of a Player Organization would also be able to determine the rules for advancement. These would be selected from a predefined list of rule types supplied by the developers to avoid questions of subjectivity, as well as to reduce roleplaying requirements. (Although anyone who wanted to handle rank advancement purely through roleplaying could do so -- advancement rules should be optional.)

Moving up a rank in a military organization might be based on:

• kills [something specific to a military organization]
• XP earned in a particular skill or special organizational XP box
• agreement of a majority of players at the next rank
• available opening of the appropriate rank

The system itself would monitor "counting" or "trigger" rules to determine for each member of the organization (to whom those rules apply) whether the target has been met. Other rules would require organization members of the appropriate level and role to decide whether the terms of those rules have been met. The combination of these rules would allow the members of organizations to effectively control advancement within the organization. This would solve one of the problems with current "guild" systems, which is that the one person at the top of the group has all the power and responsibility for controlling position within the group. A Player Organization system would allow this power to be devolved into the organization. Players would not be required to do so; they could duplicate the existing guild approach if they chose, but at least they'd be able to create more egalitarian organizations if they wished to do so.

Organizational Diversity

Military organizations are an obvious application of the Player Organization system, but the beauty of the system is that it can be used to create any kind of organization.

Another person might want to form a crafting guild, and would set up her organization based on Apprentice, Journeyman, and Master levels with appropriate advancement rules. Yet another person might form an Entertainer's Union with his own set of levels, titles, and advancement rules; another person might form an organization like a modern business with a CEO, board of directors, VPs, Directors, Managers; and so on. The Player Organization system could accommodate all these and more.

Here's an example of how a player organization interested in crafting and selling products might be designed:

SUPPLY	PRODUCTION	SALES	CORPORATE
CTO	President	CFO	Chairman
VP for R&D	Director	Regional VP	Board Member
Resource Mgr.	Project Manager	Sales Manager	Investor
Supplier	Crafter	Account Rep.	Shareholder

(Naturally, at the top of the heap there'd have to be a CEO.)

So if you were interested in sales, you'd start off as an Account Representative talking to other players about the products available from your organization, and picking up any in-game skills that might be useful to that end. If your sales figures were good enough, then when a Sales Manager position opened up you might be considered for that position, at which point you'd get some kind of nice perks in addition to the new title. In return, you'd wind up spending more of your time helping to manage the activities of several Account Reps, and you'd be responsible for their sales to your Regional VP, who in turn oversees all sales in two or three areas and reports to the CFO of the entire organization.

Again, you could have similar hierarchies for any kind of player organization: military, commercial, entertainment, whatever.

---

It would be helpful to have a way to display these titles/roles within the game. This public recognition would help encourage players to use and participate in the organization-designing system. The system as I've described it would also allow you to have objective rules for moving up in the hierarchy, which is always better than "well, maybe I'll promote you... if I feel like it."

(Actually, one of the tricky bits of my idea is the mechanism for providing rules and perks for promotion. I think it would be possible to pre-define some specific kinds of promotion rules -- number of kills of enemy type X, for example, or Y accumulated experience points in skill Z -- that the organization's designer could associate with a rank/title. But this part of the system would need to be hashed out in more detail.)

Just for giggles, here's another kind of organization you could have:

ROYALTY

TITLE	#	REQUIREMENTS
King	1	5000 royal faction, male avatar
Queen	1	5000 royal faction, female avatar
Prince	2	4000 royal faction, male avatar, acceptance by King or Queen
Princess	2	4000 royal faction, female avatar, acceptance by King or Queen
Duke	4	3000 royal faction, male avatar, acceptance by King or Queen
Duchess	4	3000 royal faction, female avatar, acceptance by King or Queen
Count	8	2000 royal faction, male avatar, acceptance by any higher rank
Countess	8	2000 royal faction, female avatar, acceptance by any higher rank
Baron	12	1000 royal faction, male avatar, acceptance by any higher rank
Baroness	12	1000 royal faction, female avatar, acceptance by any higher rank
Knight	24	600 royal faction, acceptance by any higher rank
Squire	40	250 royal faction, acceptance by any higher rank
Page	60	acceptance by any higher rank

Note 1: The # denotes how many of each rank can exist at any one time, and is another kind of requirement.

Note 2: Acceptance by a higher rank is only required if at least one person holds the indicated rank. If no one does, then acceptance is automatic.

SWG: Jump to Lightspeed: Balancing Rebel and Imperial Starship Strengths

To my mind, the right way to get the crazy swirling dogfights we all love from the movies is to make Rebel and Imperial ships truly different, and not just the exact same ships with different graphics and sound effects.

(Time for a little history. Bear with me.)

When George Lucas wrote the original story for Star Wars, his best inspiration for how the "evil Empire" was organized militarily was the Soviet Union. Historically the USSR (from its basis as a Russian civilization that is related to but distinct from our own Western civilization) had two great assets: vast territory, and abundant natural resources. These features led to a military doctrine that favored rapid production of highly mobile units. From the mounted Cossack to the T-62 tank to many MiGs, Russian/Soviet units have typically been relatively cheap to produce and simple to repair and replace, allowing military leaders to quickly apply military force at any place where a show of force was considered necessary. (Note that although some Soviet/Russian fighter jets got lots of press for having advanced features, these aircraft were not mass-produced front-line units. They were new aircraft brought to Farnborough or Paris to make the rest of the world believe that the USSR was maintaining military-technological parity with the West. Soviet fighter jet designers were often creative and brilliant, but the most advanced aircraft were far too expensive to produce in any meaningful numbers.)

The corollary to this "fast and cheap" doctrine of warfare is that individual units become expendable. The human beings who make up the individual units of such a force are no more than meat; if you need more you just produce more.

By contrast, Western military technology from its earliest days embodied the belief that the individual person has value. (This was true even if one person is thought to have more value than another.) Therefore, rather than relying on large waves of identical and expendable units, Western forces have historically been composed of small squads of specialized units which emphasize high-tech offensive power and defensive survivability. Cavalry (especially the mounted knight) and the F-15 are examples of how Western military doctrine based on the worth of the individual favors small numbers of technologically advanced units with good defensive capabilities.

With the Cold War offering these two clearly distinct models of military organization, it shouldn't be a surprise that Lucas developed the military organizations of the Empire and the Rebellion as he did. Like the Soviet Union, the Empire in Star Wars had a vast area of space to try to control. It also had access to plentiful resources from the territories it controlled. So like the USSR, the Empire needed to be able to throw large fleets of small, cheap, identical ships at targets that could pop up anywhere in a vast expanse. The Emperor's solution was the production of thousands of TIE fighters. Eliminating shields kept down costs, and using twin ion engines but not including a hyperdrive allowed excellent maneuverability once the fighters were conveyed to the battle site by a hyperdrive-equipped carrier such as a Star Destroyer.

As the Star Wars equivalent of Western civilization, the Rebel Alliance used military craft that were designed to be much more self-sufficient because the pilot inside was considered to have intrinsic worth as a person, and thus was worth preserving. (Also because Rebels are hard to replace!) Ships like X-wings and Mon Calamari cruisers were more expensive than their counterpart Imperial ships, but the Rebel ships were considerably more effective in one-on-one engagements because they packed more firepower and offered far superior defensive technology. (The Star Wars Databank, for example, offers the note that Mon Cal cruisers often featured triple the number of shield generators of comparable Imperial starships.)

Taking all this as our guide, if combat in the Space Expansion is to "feel" like the Star Wars movies, then yes, a typical engagement should consist of a few Rebel craft taking on a larger number of less powerful Imperial ships. Raw numeric odds of 2-1 or even 3-1 should be common, while "impossible" odds of 20-1 or worse (or better, depending on your point of view) should occur from time to time.

There are three main problems with implementing combat in the Space Expansion in this way.

1. "Fairness": The developers may believe that fairness requires them to make Imperial ships just as good as Rebel ships so that people who want to fly as Imperials don't spend all their time being blown out of the sky by the much more capable Rebel ships. While I'd typically agree with this view, in the case of the Space Expansion I think it would be detrimental to the feel of being part of the GCW. Flying a dangerously inferior ship -- but having lots more squadmates to support you -- should be a clearly acknowledged part of choosing to be an Imperial. In fact, this is exactly the kind of difference that makes the Empire different from the Rebellion! There's no reason to choose one over the other if their capabilities are identical. Because their ships, while more advanced, are more expensive, and because the Rebellion should have less access to resources, members of the Alliance should need to protect their ships by fighting only battles they can win and running away when they can't. And Imperials -- because their ships are weaker but less expensive -- should need to work together in large packs to react to rebel incursions in unexpected parts of the galaxy. When the Imperials win, it should be due to strength of numbers and organization.

2. "GCW stats": If Rebel and Imperial ships really are implemented with different capabilities, then the calculations for who's winning the GCW should take this disparity into account. On a raw numeric basis, it's likely that there'll be a lot more Imperial ships destroyed than Rebel ships. If the calculation for who's winning the GCW just uses a raw numeric count for Space Expansion stats, that would tend to misleadingly skew the results to the Alliance. Consider an engagement where the Empire completely destroys a flotilla of 20 Rebel ships, while the Empire loses 30 ships out of a fleet of 40 vessels. By a simple count of ships lost, the Alliance is the winner because the Empire lost more ships even though the Rebel fleet was wiped out! So if there's a real disparity between the average capabilities of Imperial and Rebel ships of comparable classes, then the GCW calculation needs to bias the raw numeric result of every engagement by some "difficulty factor" based on the difference in average capabilities. If (for example) the average Rebel ship is twice as capable (in terms of power, defenses, weapons, and other systems) as the average Imperial ship, then instead of the Rebellion winning the above engagement 20 to 30, the Empire would have won by 40 to 30 (since the 20 Rebel ships, at a 2-1 bias, would have been worth 40 Imperial ships). And "last man standing" in a fight should confer a bonus.

3. "PvE vs. PvP": If Rebel and Imperial ship capabilities are allowed to differ, then the toughest problem isn't with PvE, where Imperial ships can be spawned in reasonably appropriate numbers to match Rebel strengths (and vice versa). (Although this probably will be a serious problem if the streets of Bestine and Mos Espa, currently strewn with hundreds of stormtrooper corpses, are any guide.) The real problem is in PvP action. It's just not going to happen that often that "appropriate" numbers of Rebel ships will meet "appropriate" numbers of Imperial ships. It's much more likely that a lone Imperial will be dry-gulched by some roving band of Rebel marauders, or that a lone Rebel will mistakenly fly through an area of space next door to an Imperial Player Association's gathering point. No matter what, PvP in the Space Expansion is likely to be unpleasant for the solo player. Furthermore, if the capabilities of Imperial ships are allowed to be less (on average) than Rebel ships, the servants of the Empire are likely to feel even less happy about PvP than members of the Alliance.

...

Having said all this, I still think allowing Imperial ships to be less capable on average than Rebel ships is worth doing. It's more "historically" accurate; it's more in keeping with Star Wars canon; and -- most important for SWG -- it helps distinguish the playing experience of being a Rebel from that of playing as an Imperial.

Player Contracts +

Some interesting objections came up to the Player Contracts concept that deserve a response.

BoberFett wrote:
I like the idea, I've given the contract system some thought myself. The biggest hurdle to overcome is not the punishment system (in my eyes anyway) but how the system decides whether or not the terms have been met. I'll just use your ideas.

• Exchange (swap goods for goods or goods for money)

If I am contracted to make somebody a weapon, I can give them a weapon back with any stats I want. They hand me Krayt tissue and I give them back a 150 max damage scout, as far as the sytem is concerned I fulfilled my end of the bargain. The buyer on the other hand will want to report me to a CSR for arbitration.

One of the features I mentioned in my original Player Contracts design document was that each contract type would have terms that were specific to it. It's these terms that will allow players to specify what will and what won't satisfy them, so the terms available for any contract type have to be ones that let players verify that they're really getting what they want.

In this Exchange example, the terms would have to allow the potential buyer to specify the values of the features of the item being requested. In the case of a weapon, I'd want to be able to specific minimum and maximum damage values, wound values, range values, encumbrance values -- basically any numeric feature of the item being requested.

When contracts allow sufficiently specific terms (as my proposal recommends), contract resolution can work because players will have the power to get what they really want.

Note that this is even more likely to work well for one-time, immediate Exchange contracts which, as I noted, are basically our current Secure Trade. In this kind of contract, you could actually /examine the object to see if it's what you really want. We can't do any better than this currently, so it's hard to see how doing it as a contract is any worse!

BoberFett wrote:

• Transport (move items [or player characters] to a specified location)

How does the system decide when the trip is complete? If somebody wants me to fly them from Mos Eisley to Endor, what happens if I drop off a second passenger at Moenia on the way? Does it wait for me to continue on to Endor? Does it consider me in breach even if I do eventually get them to Endor?

The thing to realize here is that the functionality to accomplish Transport missions already exists: it's the code that "knows" when you've come within a certain distance of a specific waypoint.

The system would know the trip was complete when you landed at the designated spaceport and your passenger exited your ship. Since Transport contracts could be specified as simply as "take me to X spaceport," or could include a "by such-and-such time" clause, as long as you get your passengers where they want to go -- as specified in the contract that each ones signs with you -- then there's no problem.

If you accept a contract to take someone somewhere by a specific time, and you don't make it in time, that's not a flaw in the system -- that's you having made a bad business decision.

BoberFett wrote:

• Heal (heal wounds or cure diseases of a specified living target)

What if while in the middle of healing, the party who is being healed is attacked and killed. Is the other party who agreed to do the healing in breach?

1. Remember that it's not necessary to have a penalty for breach of contract. In that case, it wouldn't matter if either party died before the requested healing was completed.

2. Since a one-shot heal is pretty trivial, most healing contracts would probably be on a recurring basis -- either for a set number of heals, or for a set number of pool points healed, or for healing any number of points for a certain amount of time. (Curing diseases would work the same way.) In this case, either character dying wouldn't have anything to do with breaching the contract. Cancelling one's character would, however; in this case the character who was deleted would be the one considered in breach.

3. If despite all this either party died in the middle of a one-shot heal with penalty, then we have to look at why the contract couldn't be fulfilled. If the healer tries to fulfill his end but can't (because the recipient is dead), then that's not his fault -- the dead character should get penalized (in addition to dying, which seems harsh, but then he didn't have to ask for a penalty for breaking the contract). If on the other hand the healer has the capability to complete the agreed healing but doesn't, then in that case it would be the healer who has broken the contract and should be penalized.

The point in all this is to further emphasize how important it is for the contract system to be detailed enough that players can specify the terms they really want in any contract type. If that's done, and if the code that monitors game events works properly (a big "if," I freely admit), then contracts could work.

BoberFett wrote:

• Obtain (take possession of a specified item)

How do you determine which object is the one you want? By name? By serial number? Couldn't somebody pull a bait and switch?

1. Objects have semi-unique serial numbers. (Exact duplicates can have the same serial number.) This provides a secure way of identifying specific objects that the game system can use to ensure the secure transfer of items.

2. Objects have properties. If you're offered an item, you have the ability to examine it, and the contract system has the ability to test numeric properties against contract terms. If the item offered is not equal to or better than what you specified you wanted, you don't have to accept it... and the contract system doesn't have to, either.

BoberFett wrote:
These are just off the top of my head. The systems required to handle the exceptions possible in all of these scenarios would end up dwarfing the combat system. It's taken them how long to get around to a combat balance? I wouldn't expect a contract system like you're discussing for a loooong time.

I don't pretend that any contract system would be perfect. Even if every property of an object was a specifiable term of a contract, there'd still be features that players would want added.

But I do think that a contract system that was designed so that most (if not all) object properties were available as player-specifiable contract terms would handle most of the cases in which exceptions could occur.

Trivial to design and code? No. This would be a significant effort -- not as much as for the Space Expansion, but several months of labor by two or three developers at least. And then it would have to be exhaustively playtested to squeeze out the bugs. But I also think the result would be worth this investment. Just imagine the possibilities for player interaction if we could offer each other missions....

BoberFett wrote:
I agree a system like this would be loads of fun and add a lot of immersion and community building to the game. I just don't see it as feasible. There's a reason contract law is a massive industry consisting of an army of attorneys, and not is not run by a computer program. The human element to contracts is far too unpredictable.

Understood, and no offense taken. I happen to come to a different conclusion, but your points about the difficulty of getting something like this right are well-founded.

I would only suggest that a game-run contract system actually has an important advantage over a RL contract system: freedom of action in the game world is much more constrained.

In RL you can write a contract to do anything (legal). Trying to write rules to reflect this apparently infinite breadth of human action is both the source of economic productivity and legal wrangling.

In a computer game, however, you have to spell out specific contract types and terms. This means you don't get all the economic advantages in a game because you're excluding economic activity that's not allowed by your contract types. But it also means that you don't get all the questions of interpretation of RL contracts. And when interpretation isn't a factor, you don't need judges or lawyers.

By constraining contracts to numerically-verifiable terms, you create a system that a perfectly impartial adjudicator (the computer) can successfully resolve.

That's why I remain optimistic about a computer game with contracts. You're absolutely right that it won't be easy to implement well, but "hard" doesn't necessarily imply "practically impossible." Given a good design, and a careful implementation of a contract resolution engine, I think this could work.

SWG: Crafting -- A Blueprint for the Future +

As usual, I've been a little wordy in my initial presentation. So let me summarize what I'm after when I ask for crafting to focus more on process than on result.

1. Craftable objects ought to have more properties.

All objects ought to have variable color, size, and shape, and various types of objects should have additional properties relevant to their purpose. To list just a very few examples of additional properties:

• Weapons:
• alternate fire modes
• concealability
• bonuses against certain mob types
• Armor:
• strengths/weaknesses against certain damage types
• concealability
• special powers (perhaps with charges)
• Musical Instruments:
• alternate tunings
• reverb/sustain/chorus/tremolo/pitch bend
• visual effects timed to current music
• Vehicles:
• speed shifters
• climb rate shifters
• turn shifters
• Survey Devices:
• range vs. resolution tradeoffs
• droid interfaces
• automatic modes

Foods, droids, starships, and all other types of crafted objects should have similar extended properties.

2. Resource types and subcomponent configurations should determine the properties of crafted objects.

Food created with rice should be different somehow than food created with wheat; food created with Lokian wheat should be different somehow from food made with Nabooian wheat; food produced with domesticated wheat should differ from food produced with wild wheat, and so on. Igneous ores and sedimentary ores should result in objects with different final properties, as should using Copper versus Aluminum in a schematic that simply calls for a Non-Ferrous Metal. Maybe different materials just change the color of the final object, or its size, but the materials used to build an object need to be reflected somehow in that object.

In more complicated objects, the way that subcomponents are connected to each other should determine other types of properties that those complex crafted objects have. "Configuring" subcomponents could be as simple as clicking to draw a line between any of the subcomponents. Or it could be as intricate as offering a certain number of "bonds" (like molecular bonds) per object (perhaps derived from the complexity of the object) -- you could choose to link all subcomponents in a "ring" pattern, or join all subcomponents to a central subcomponent in a "star" pattern, or join just a few subcomponents using double bonds, and so on. Or perhaps you click on the name of a pattern and the schematic's subcomponents are connected automatically. In any case, the specific configuration chosen by the crafter should dictate what properties the final crafted object has.

As a final feature, let experimental modes also be determined by the types of resources and configuration of subcomponents. Maybe some resources let you experiment on durability while others don't, but those others instead let you experiment on damage capabilities. This would give the developers what they were looking for in the aborted Publish 7 crafting change (to prevent crafters from maxing out all an object's experimental properties), while still allowing players to decide what experimental features they want in an object by letting them choose what resources and subcomponent configurations they want to use in crafting that object.

3. The numeric quality level of resources and subcomponents should determine the highest level to which a crafted object can be experimented.

If the value of an object's Experimental Durability is determined by a resource's Shock Resistance value, then using a resource with the maximum SR value of 1000 should result in the maximum number of experimentation points available to spend on improving the final object's Durability.

(This is how crafting works now. It's good, and doesn't need to be changed. I mention it here only to make it clear that the types of resources used should determine the types of properties of the final object, while the quality of the resources used should determine the amount to which the final object has those properties.)

4. Critical fails should be balanced by critical successes.

A critical success on assembly should leave most or all resources in the schematic after construction, just as a critical failure destroys resources and subcomponents. (Architect schematics would be exempt from the effects of critical failures and critical successes.)

A critical success on experimentation should improve the property being experimented on to levels beyond the normal caps (which are determined by resource quality & subcomponent effectiveness values).

Critical success rates should be held to no more than 1%. Critical successes should be frequent enough to motivate crafting, but rare enough to discourage grinding.

[2005/03/30: A "critical success" feature like the one suggested here may now be part of crafting.]

...

I hope this clarifies what I'd like crafting to become. Again, my goal is to find ways to make it more fun by moving the focus away from just achieving some result (which promotes mindless grinding) and toward a more interesting process.

SWG: Crafting -- A Blueprint for the Future

I've been a crafter since SWG was released. In addition to mastering the Artisan and Merchant professions, I've picked up and used Novice-or-better skills from all the advanced crafting professions branching from the Engineering discipline. I've enjoyed crafting, but for a while now something has been bothering me about crafting in SWG. I think I've been able to put my finger on what it is: there's no surprise.

I. THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE

The design of the crafting system in SWG is highly result-oriented, rather than being process-oriented. In other words, the point is what you get at the end of crafting, rather than the act of crafting itself. That's good for making sure that other players have the things they need, but it can leave crafters feeling a bit like mere cogs in a product distribution machine.

Other than being a bit boring, there's nothing really wrong with crafting's result-oriented design. There are actually a number of good ideas well implemented. The idea of schematics is good. The concept of needing different kinds of resources and subcomponents in schematics is good. The concept of resources having different attributes that condition the effectiveness of the final product is good. And the concept of experimentation is good.

But something is missing. The design focus on results over process has left the act of crafting an exercise in grinding, rather than allowing crafting to be something that's fun in its own right because the process itself is interesting. If I may suggest the source of this problem: the assembly and experimentation steps are too simple to allow for surprise.

What makes engineering (more specifically, "invention") fun in the real world is that you don't always know exactly what you're going to get. The behavior of complex objects isn't normally a pass/fail, perfect/junk kind of thing (as in SWG) -- complex real-world objects often live in a gray area of functionality. When you put many odd-shaped things together in different ways, when you try new kinds of parts as subcomponents, it's hard to know precisely how the final object will look or act. Real-world objects demonstrate unpredictable and even surprising behaviors precisely because they are complex. This element of surprise is what makes real-world "crafting" an interesting and fun process.

But there's no chance of anything interesting happening when assembling or experimenting on an item in SWG because you always know exactly what you're going to get. With a few exceptions (certain armor and weapon schematics can take an optional component), you always assemble the same components in the same amounts, and they always go together in exactly the same way. As for experimentation, the only question is whether you'll have to craft your prototype for practice XP because one of your experiments yielded a result less than "great success." This player focus on only accepting "perfect" products is the natural result of a crafting design that's focused on results for other players instead of being a fun process for the crafters themselves.

But what if not getting exactly what you wanted didn't always mean that the result was unusable? What if not all surprises were bad (as they are now with critical fails)? In short, what if you could have "interesting failures?"

II. PROPOSED CHANGES

There are four changes I'd like to see made to crafting in order to allow for surprise, and thus for a crafting experience that's a lot more fun:

1. Complex objects should have multiple appearance and performance characteristics beyond simple numeric attributes.
2. The attributes of the resources used to craft an object should be reflected in the appearance and/or performance of the final product.
3. The configuration of subcomponents should be reflected in the appearance and/or performance of the final product.
4. Critical failures in experimentation should be balanced by critical successes.

Let's look at each of these suggestions in more detail to see how it would help contribute to a more interesting and satisfying crafting experience.

III. DISCUSSION OF CHANGES

1. PERFORMANCE/APPEARANCE CHARACTERISTICS

If every instance of a particular crafted object looks and acts the same way, surprise is impossible. This isn't always a bad thing -- you wouldn't want significant variation in products manufactured by a factory, for example.

But constructed objects need to have a wide variety of appearance and performance characteristics if variation in materials and processes are to allow for surprising results. If an object always looks the same and always has the same operational characteristics, then what's the point of making such an object except to have one? Where's the joy in the process of creating the item?

The three most common appearance characteristics are color, shape, and size. Clothing is allowed color customization options (and Tailors are given more color customization options than Artisans) because it's understood that making clothing (which doesn't allow experimentation) would be incredibly boring otherwise. Another example of appearance customization is a pistol whose scope and stock have been selected from a list of optional types, and which displays those selected scope and stock types when the crafted pistol is examined. And of course we now have basic (frame and trim) customization kits for droids and vehicles.

These options should be extended to many more items. Objects should be capable of having different colors; they should be craftable in a range of sizes; their shapes should be allowed to vary in well-defined ways.

For example, consider a simple object: a staff. Why must all staves be the same length? And why brown? Sure, trees on Earth have brown wood... but we're not on Earth! Similarly, why should even more complex objects all look the same? Must the engines always be in the same place on a landspeeder? Why are there only about ten types of house plans in the entire galaxy?

As for performance characteristics, these include the obvious ones -- min and max damage, range-based to-hit modifiers, and attack speed for weapons, for example, as well as other purely numeric attributes -- but objects have other features that should be variable.

Consider ranged weapons: when you fire them, they have a visual effect (such as a blaster bolt) and they make a sound. What if these effects could vary? Maybe blaster bolts can come in different colors (like lightsabers). Maybe the sound effect can be pitched differently, or perhaps it has a different duration. You wouldn't want to allow too much variety in these attributes since they're considered defining features for those objects. But some reasonable variation should be possible.

Other performance characteristics that should vary between objects include: bonuses or weaknesses versus certain mobs or classes of mobs; special behaviors in certain environments (desert, forest, water, nighttime); alternate-fire modes (for some weapons); vehicle top speeds, turn rates, and acceleration rates; droid intelligence and loyalty; and so on.

2. RESOURCE ATTRIBUTES

Once you've established that objects can have many different kinds of varying features, you need a way to relate those features to the materials used to construct objects.

The good news is that we're already partway to achieving this because the resource system already allows a great deal of variation. For example, there are several types of Mineral (Metal, Ore, Radioactives); two types of Metal (Ferrous and Non-Ferrous); two types of Non-Ferrous Metal (Aluminum and Copper); several types of Copper (Mythra, Platinite, etc.); and several places (Lok, Naboo, etc.) where you can get that kind of Copper. All these attributes could contribute to the qualities of the final product creating using them.

Let's use the staff again as our example. It's made out of wood (like witches), but that wood can be of three types, and can come from any planet. That's thirty different types of wood right there! Why shouldn't the type of wood used contribute to the performance of the staff, and to its appearance? Let's assume that the basic numeric attributes don't vary (since otherwise we'd have people complaining "I can't make staffs!" because the "best" wood currently has lousy stats).

Maybe wood from Lok causes staves to be tinted green. Maybe deciduous wood does extra kinetic damage because it's harder than evergreen or coniferous wood, but this also makes staves made from deciduous wood decay much faster than those made from evergreen or coniferous wood. Maybe Endorian Evergreen Wood has minerals in it that make it particularly effective against any kind of spider. Maybe objects crafted from coniferous wood from Yavin IV glow in the dark.

See how this works? Crafting currently doesn't make nearly enough use of resource attributes in determining properties of the final product... but it could.

3. SUBCOMPONENT CONFIGURATION

For more complex objects which include subcomponents, appearance and performance characteristics should be related to how the crafter chooses to connect these component parts to each other.

In the current system you make a bunch of similar subcomponents, then another set of other similar subcomponents, then a few more subcomponents, then you take them all and, with some raw resources, lay them out flat on a table, hit the "assemble" button, and hey presto!, you've built an item. (Assuming you don't get a critical fail on assembly.) While this does at least recognize that complex items tend to be built from subcomponents, it doesn't recognize the importance of allowing crafters to vary the organization of those subcomponents.

As a variation on the above scenario, suppose instead that you craft four similar subcomponents. When you lay them out to construct the larger item that is composed of these pieces, you get to choose how you want those pieces to be connected to each other. (I imagine the crafting tool GUI letting you click to draw lines between subcomponents to indicate configuration connections.) One configuration might improve the final item's durability at the cost of some of its power; another might give you the same type of item but one that's brittle but very effective; a third configuration might give you mediocre performance attributes but some kind of additional special power.

For very complex products that require many different subcomponents, you should have numerous options for how to interconnect the pieces -- so many, in fact, that it's effectively impossible to predict the exact final qualities of the finished assembled object.

There should still be some predictability in this process. Making two complex objects with the same configuration of subcomponents should yield two items with similar appearance and performance characteristics. But where the artisan has choices for how the subcomponents of a complex object can fit together, those choices should affect the features of the finished component.

4. CRITICAL SUCCESSES

As a final suggestion, if critical failures -- either in assembly or experimentation -- can ruin a crafted object, shouldn't critical successes also be possible?

Just as a critical failure is an "I don't know what I did wrong!" situation, a critical success would represent the rare "I don't know how I did it but WOW!" situation. To allow only horrible results is both unrealistic and not "fair" in a game context.

There are two obvious ways to reflect critical success situations. I propose that each of these two possibilities be implemented, one for the assembly phase, and one for experimentation.

(In the discussion that follows, please note that a critical success is not the same thing as an "amazing success" result any more than a critical failure is the same thing as a "moderate failure" result. "Critical success" should either be a new result type, or the "amazing success" result type should be enhanced in the ways described here.)

In the assembly phase, just as a critical failure results in the complete loss of all resources and subcomponents, a critical success should result in the crafting of the desired item without using up any resources or components. The risk of losing all materials (in a critical failure) should be balanced by the potential reward of getting to keep all your materials (in a critical success). (Note that this would not apply to Architect-only schematics since these are no longer subject to the threat of loss in a critical failure. Just as Architect objects aren't subject to the risk of loss, they should always be used up no matter what the result of assembly.)

The obvious result of a critical success in the experimentation phase should be object performance that is better than would normally be possible. The features improved should only be those on which experimentation points were spent, and performance should only be improved proportional to the number of experimentation points spent.

One potential problem with this enhancement would be that some individuals with excessive free time and plenty of patience might be inclined to try to make all their objects "perfect" with critical successes on all experimentation attempts. This is unlikely to be effective for several reasons.

First, the percentage rate of critical successes should be about 1% for everyone. (This would still favor Master crafters, since they have more experimentation points to spend than other crafters.) A 1% critical success rate would make these events sufficiently rare that someone who wants to craft only perfect items would only be able to create perhaps two or three such items per day. Given how good these items would be, how in demand they would be, and how much money high-end players have, a crafter would not be able to keep such items stocked (nor any other items if he spends all his time trying to craft perfect items!), not even if he could craft 24/7 with macros that somehow knew how to keep only perfect items.

Second, the maximum possible improvement would only be possible by either using up all your experimentation points in one burst and getting a critical success on that attempt, or by getting a critical success result for each and every experiment attempt. In the former case, a 1% success rate would mean harvesting resources and crafting subcomponents only to destroy all of them 99 times for every one "perfect" item created. The cost of doing this (particularly for very high-end items) would likely not be recoverable through the sale of the one perfect item. As for trying to use experimentation points separately, a 1% critical success rate and 10 or more experimentation points to spend makes getting 10 critical successes in a row not very likely.

Overall, implementing critical successes would be one more way to allow the rare and pleasant surprises that make crafting fun.

[2005/03/30: It's come to my attention that critical success results, while rare, are now possible. It's probably not implemented in the way I've described it above, but any progress here is appreciated!]

IV. CONCLUSION

By offering variability in crafted object features, by allowing crafters to have lots of choices in resource usage and subcomponent configurations, and by making those choices have different results in finished products, you take the focus off of repeatedly grinding out the same thing over and over again, and move the focus to letting crafters make creative decisions that help to differentiate their products from those of other crafters. That would be tons more fun for crafters, plus product differentiation would help them market the products they create, plus it would allow the people who buy these items to better define their characters by having distinctive possessions.

When crafters are able to express their creativity as an integral part of the crafting process, everybody wins.

SWG: Pazaak

I finally broke down and paid the bucks for Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR). It turns out to be such a good game that I'd like to suggest that SWG implement the KOTOR minigame Pazaak as quickly as possible. This minigame is just too much fun, too good a fit into the Star Wars universe, and too useful as a new SWG feature. (For example, it would help prove that "content" doesn't just mean "dungeons." Ahem.)

For those who haven't yet played KOTOR, this is a card game between two players. The general rules for Pazaak are roughly as follows:

• cards in the standard deck are numbered 1 through 10


• the deck can be considered infinite (there are always more cards)


• players agree to wager some amount of cash before a match begins


• matches consist of three sets


• to play a set:


• players begin taking turns turning over one deck card each


• the value of a deck card turned over is added to that player's point total


• (for SWG, the player who goes first in a set should be randomly selected)


• each player may optionally play a private "hand card" (added to that player's total)


• each player starts a match with four hand cards from a personal side deck


• when a hand card is played, it is gone for the remainder of the match


• after taking a deck card (and possibly a hand card), each player must choose to:


• "end turn" (agree to take another deck card next turn)


• "stand" (take no more deck or hand cards for the rest of the set)


• if a player ever has 20 points showing, he automatically stands


• players continue taking turns until one of the following happens:


• one player stands or ends a turn with 21 or more points


• the other player wins the set


• both players stand


• the player with more points showing wins the set


• if both players are tied, another set is started and played


• the first player to win three sets wins the match and play ends

This by itself would be interesting, but there are a couple of clever twists.

First of all, you carry your own personal Pazaak cards as inventory items. When a Pazaak match starts, you choose ten of your personal cards for a side deck, out of which four cards are randomly chosen as your hand cards (which the other player can't see). When you start playing KOTOR you have ten personal cards to choose from -- 2 each of cards valued at 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. So you start with all ten of these cards as your side deck, out of which the game might randomly choose 1, 3, 3, and 4 as hand cards for use during a match.

The second twist (which really gives Pazaak its flavor) is that you can add new personal cards to your inventory that have negative numbers. Having a hand card with negative points means that if you go over 20 you can play one of these negative cards and go back to 20 or less, allowing you to stay in the game.

For example, let's say I've got a hand card of -2. I'm currently showing 14 points, and I turn over a deck card. It's an eight, which gives me a total of 22 points. If I stand now, the other player will win because I've got 21 or more points showing. Instead, I additionally play my -2 hand card -- this brings my total back down to 20, allowing me to stay in the set (and possibly win it).

Even better than negative cards are some cards which let you choose whether their numeric value is positive or negative when you play it. In this way a card that's plus-or-minus-2 could get you to 20 whether you have 18 or 22 showing. Part of your goal in being a Pazaak player is to build a side deck consisting of nothing but plus/minus cards.

BUT... you don't start KOTOR with these negative or plus/minus cards -- you have to find these cards to add them to your inventory. Then you can gradually replace the cards in your starting side with these improved cards. They turn up as loot, or in various containers, or can be bought from various vendors.

The tactics of Pazaak thus lie in knowing:

• which cards to choose for the ten in your side deck


• when to stand vs. when to turn over another card


• when to play one of the four cards in your private deck

It seems to me that this mini-game would make an excellent addition to SWG. It's already part of the Star Wars canon; it's already part of the LucasArts franchise (so no ownership issues); it would be another way for players to interact; it could move large quantities of money around (especially if no hard limit was set on wagers ;-); and Pazaak cards would make great loot as long as they remained sufficiently rare.

[2008/05/16: If a new MMORPG set in the KOTOR era of the Star Wars universe is really being made by LucasArts and BioWare, then having Pazaak as a minigame in that MMORPG makes even more sense, considering it was BioWare who created Pazaak for KOTOR!]

SWG: Jump to Lightspeed: Space Commerce +

Draconicius wrote:
how about a galactic space mall that travels. In this ship/station (whatever you wanna call it) players can rent a space to drop a merchant in a designated area.

I love this concept.

Theoretically, if you can have multiplayer starships you could put darn near anything in space -- why not a traveling mall? I can imagine the base for the thing being a very complex structure requiring millions of resources (and credits) to build -- once merchants set up tents there, the builder should probably get a small percentage of every transaction to defray his building costs (and to profit a profit incentive to build the thing in the first place).

As far as that goes, why insist on immobile space stations? Sure, that's easier to do than a moving platform... but conceptually it's not hard to imagine letting entire player cities move through space. Just strap big honkin' engines onto them! These mobile cities might be subject to certain limitations -- they can't land on a planetary surface, and they can't go into hyperspace. This would mean that they can't get away from faster ships who might intend harm to them, so they'd either have to be immune to damage (like ground-based houses), or very well-protected -- ion cannons, laser turrets, starfighters -- the works.

Of course this isn't an entirely new idea. James Blish wrote a series of four excellent books collectively titled Cities In Flight about a city -- New York, in fact -- that is cut free from the ground, equipped with faster-than-light drives, and travels around the galaxy. But even if it's been suggested before, it would still be amazing to actually play a game that includes something like this, wouldn't it?

Draconicius wrote:
This could be used as sort of an inter-stellar cantina. This would also work great with your Cargo idea.. but on a much lower scale. Only a few spaces per player could be rented on a trip. The items would be transferred into the inventory as the player leaves the ship. Not only that but the Station will only accept lvls of cargo of medium risk. Anything greater risks blowing a hole in the ship, infecting the inhabitants with a disease, cause the people in the med center to go crazy and attack, and so on. This will allow the newer players to actively take part in the space aspect of the game without feeling left out due to the lack of credits.

I like this, too. Absolutely there should be consequences if the material properties idea is implemented, and if some material isn't handled properly. Why not just tie a material's storage requirements to some kind of tariff? The more dangerous it is, the more it costs to bring it aboard for sale. (Naturally, if you can smuggle it past Customs, you won't pay any kind of fee at all... but if you're caught with it, you're in Big Trouble.)

We do probably want to be careful that only the person who doesn't handle the stuff right is penalized for it, though (otherwise it would be possible to grief other players). OTOH, it might be fun to unleash some kind of minor but general problem on an entire station/city. Maybe some kind of small, inoffensive, fuzzy lifeform that breeds prodigiously could get into everything (including the local grain stores)... hmm....

Draconicius wrote:
Another idea if this goes in is docking berths for people with starfighters... there could be mission terminals that give defense missions for the station (although escort missions ALWAYS suck), as it is just a big hunk of metal in space, but this also raises the question of what happens to the station if the defense is inadequate. Maybe the station is NOT accessible until damage control teams fix the docking bays. Exiting the station should never be a problem BUT if you are on the station and a certain amount of damage is sustained by the ship the players INSIDE should be prepared for a pirate boarding party.

Dunno if this sounds feasible... but I personally would like a mobile base to dock my personal starfighter in.

This sounds exactly right to me. Before I go too far down this road, however, I'd need to know more about how ships will land/dock in the Space Expansion. Depending on how that works, it could turn out to be easy -- or prohibitively difficult -- to allow ships to dock to mobile platforms. I note, however, that this capability is required for some starships to operate as carriers... and as we all know, your basic TIE fighter has to operate out of some kind of carrier because it has no hyperdrive. So there's a chance this "docking starfighters to a moving space platform" capability could be included in the Space Expansion.

Draconicius wrote:
will there be any threat out there that all factions (imp/reb/neutral) must band together to defeat? Like a giant space krayt dragon? 80 bazillion ham and eats Death Stars for snacks /runs in fear

Or some crazy freelancer (NPC) chooses to interdict a planet and all must try to band together to defeat him? Until the NPC is defeated or decides to leave shuttle transport can resume as normal. But if the NPC is still around only passenger ships and starfighters will be able to get to the planet. Although there is a MUCH greater chance of a pirate encounter.

That would be fun, wouldn't it? The art and programming teams would need to create appropriate resources, which might be asking a bit much for a one-shot (or even just two- or three-shot) event -- producers generally prefer to create reusable objects; you get more bang for your buck that way.

So I suspect we won't see too many unique, large-scale threats, especially of the "monster" variety. It might be possible, however, to someday bump into a really big starship. That might take some programming and "digiteer" effort, but it could reuse existing art/sound assets.

Maybe one of Jabba's competitors gets hold of a surplus ISD and tries to interdict Tatooine with it, and Rebels and Imperials have to fight side by side to bring it down -- would something like that work?

Environment and Tactics

Why doesn't the physical environment of a MMOG play a larger role in what players can (and can't) do?

I may have some more to say on this later (uh-oh!), but for now let me just focus on the kinds of things we could do in combat if the game made better use of environmental phenomena.

Combat in MMOGs is still too much governed by who's carrying the bigger stick. Why are we as gamers satisfied with that? The really interesting stuff happens when you're able to make tactical plans (and counter-plans) based on environmental factors.

Environmental factors that should (but currently don't) play a meaningful role include:

• line-of-sight affected by:
• weather (rain, fog, haze, etc.)
• darkness
• distance
• ground/rocks
• water
• trees
• structures
• mounts
• vehicles
• mobs
• NPCs
• PCs
• paradrop ability (death from above)
• tunneling (death from below)
• underwater movement (sneak attack)
• camouflage effective against PvP foes
• tree density in forests (should slow vehicles down more)

All these things ought to factor into combat planning and operations... but they don't. Right now "tactics" in most MMOGs is basically just deciding which of your character's special attacks to spam at an opponent. And getting "good" at combat means grinding XP so you can get a bigger stick to whack someone with.

Yawn.

Wouldn't it be more fun to be able to sneak up on someone, or to have to carefully plan an assault on a fortified position to make use of environmental assets, or to make the most efficient use of faction points by thoughtfully using environmental features when setting up a base, or to plan the best place to ambush an enemy column, or to need to post guards, or to be able to outwit guards, or to plan your escape if something disrupts your op?

The bottom line is that it shouldn't be just the size of the stick that determines your effectiveness, but how you use it.

(Can I say that here? ;-)

In fact, not only should there be environmental factors to visibility and movement, there ought to be various types of technology that can make use of, add to, or cut through these factors as well.

For example, suppose you've been tasked with setting some demo packs in the middle of a lightly-populated enemy campsite. The enemy has cleverly set up camp out in the middle of an open field (rather than in a forest where the trees could hide your approach), but you've elected to make your infiltration attempt at night, when visibility is lowest. Now you have a better chance of sneaking up on that enemy camp without being detected... but what about guard animals that use scent? OK, there's scent masking, that's good... but what about the sniper in the guard tower whose rifle is probably equipped with an infrared scope? Maybe there's an armor mod that can mask your infrared signature (at the cost of some protection)... but what about motion tracking sensors? Well, maybe crawling will let you sneak under their beams... but what if moving so slowly exposes you to the searchlights on that tower? Would a HALO parachute jump be a better option?

Let's try another example. You and your team are driving your vehicles back to you HQ after a long session; you're low on powerups and stims, and your healer has just logged out. Suddenly dozens of laser bolts arc toward your team from behind the bushes and trees -- it's an ambush! What do you do? You can try to run, but they can run too, and they'll pick you off from behind by massing their fire on each of you one at a time. Would you like to be able to block LOS by popping smoke grenades? What if there were "caltrop grenades" -- little disposable robots you could drop whose function was to run toward an enemy vehicle and explode? What if you could duck behind other trees, or put away your vehicle and equip a rebreather that let you dive into the deep part of a nearby lake? Do you think having these options might increase your odds of surviving?

You get the idea. Allowing a meaningful set of environmental factors to alter visibility and movement options dramatically enhances the player's ability to make interesting combat choices. Adding such factors will definitely complicate the physics of the game, and that's a technical challenge... but it's one worth taking on for the major payoff in enjoyment provided.

SWG: Hero NPCs and Factional Gameplay

How can Hero NPCs best be used in a game where all the players want to be heroes, too?

On the one hand, you've got individual players who in many cases want to be Luke Skywalker -- they want to do things in the Star Wars universe that matter. They want to play a meaningful role in an epic story.

On the other hand... you've got many other individual players who all want to be Luke Skywalker, too! How in the world do you create a multiplayer game that satisfies all these people? They can't all be heroes of the Rebellion or the Empire!

...or can they?

To be successful over the long haul, SWG has to be constructed to give the individual player just enough freedom to have some impact in the game world, but not enough to prevent other players from having similar impact based on their own actions. To achieve this goal requires thinking like an individual player to understand what they want... but that's not enough. For a player to feel his actions have meaning -- that he's not just grinding -- the local effects of a player's actions have to have some cumulative global effect that the player can see. And that requires a different kind of design thought process.

The bottom-up individualistic viewpoint is important, and it's enough to satisfy the adrenaline junkies over the short term. But for a satisfying long-term gameplay experience, someone has to have spent some time integrating the individual game features from a top-down strategic viewpoint. The parts have to fit together to create a unique and unpredictable (but acceptable) whole. To put it another way, it's necessary for local effects to accumulate to some important global result, because that result filtering back down to the individual player is what proves to him that his actions have meaning.

There are obvious and subtle ways to accomplish this, but they all hinge on some designer having thought about how individual actions add up, and on some developer actually implementing features to sum up actions and reflect the resultant back to individual players.

Let's assume for the sake of this discussion that we have or can easily get the first part of this equation -- that what you and everyone else does is being watched and remembered and adds up to something that affects the course of the Galactic Civil War. OK, what then?

I'll offer two examples to give you the flavor of what is possible, and what we might aspire to having in SWG.

1. The Empire

You are a faithful servant of the Empire. You've mastered one or two combat professions, and exterminated countless Rebel scum in your progress through the ranks. In fact, you just earned enough faction points to buy the rank of Captain.

When other players you know have earned this rank, they've received the usual message. But something different happens this time -- you get a "loading" screen. Suddenly you find yourself in a shadowed (instanced) audience chamber... and you hear the labored panting of someone using a breathing regulator.

"Congratulations, Captain," you hear Lord Vader say from somewhere in the gloom. "I have been watching your progress with interest. Your rise through the ranks has been swift, and the Emperor appreciates your efforts on his behalf."

Without warning, Darth Vader looms out of the darkness before you. You sense a malign strength that could crush the life from you with a thought.

"But do not think, Captain, that your promotion entitles you to a life of ease. From those to whom the Emperor has granted authority, much is expected. You must do more to crush the Rebellion to prove your worthiness to wear this insignia."

The system dings, and you see a spatial message, "You have been awarded the Order of the Scarlet Robe, Second Class badge."

As Vader fades back into the shadows, he says, "Do not fail me, Captain. I will be watching...."

After another loading screen, you find yourself back where you were before your audience with Darth Vader... only now you're sporting a set of captain's bars and a shiny new badge.

Do you think this would help you feel like a valued soldier of the Empire, and motivate you to look for more ways to serve the Empire?

2. The Rebellion

You're a humble crafter who sympathizes with the Rebellion, but while you've signed up with a Rebel recruiter you just can't bring yourself to support the Rebellion overtly. After all, you've got a business to run.

But as time goes by, you notice that the buildings around your shop start to have Imperial symbols on them. And there seem to be a lot more stormtroopers hassling you. And your business has fallen off; you're not making as many sales as you used to, even though your products have improved.

One day you're contentedly tinkering away on a vehicle when the front door of your shop opens. In walks a customer who exudes an attitude of competence and authority, and he strides directly up to you.

"We need to talk," he says. "I'm Wedge Antilles, in charge of the resistance in this area. I know you support us; I've talked to our recruiter... but what I don't understand is why you're helping the Empire!"

He gestures forcefully, obviously upset. "Our Bothan spies -- don't bother looking around, you'll never spot them -- tell us that you're selling a lot of equipment to Imperials. In fact, you've done so well for them that we're actually losing the war in this area."

Wedge glares at you. "We can't afford to have an Imperial sympathizer in our ranks. So I'm going to make it easy for you: you have a choice."

"One," he says. "You can close up your shop here and move somewhere else where you can make your equipment for our cause. Or two... you can lose your status as one of us. If you're going to help the Empire, we don't need you."

Wedge adjusts his jacket as he prepares to leave. "I'll give you a week to decide. If your shop is still here by then, you'll return to being neutral in this conflict."

He looks you in the eye one last time. "We need you. You're a capable crafter, and I believe you understand what we're fighting for. I hope you'll do the right thing."

And he turns and walks out the door.

Do you think this would give you a greater sense of your value in the game as a whole, and possibly even persuade you to take a more active role in the GCW?

---

Obvious and subtle. Subtle in that small actions add up to meaningful results that are reflected in the game environment, and obvious in that the sum of a player's actions are occasionally reflected back to that player in a memorable way.

A game like that -- where today's actions have consequences tomorrow -- could last a long time.