Massively multiplayer online game
A massively multiplayer online 'game, sometimes referred to as an MMOG', is an online video game with a large number of players to interact in the same online game world. MMOs usually feature a huge, persistent open world, although there are games that differ. These games can be found for most network-capable platforms, including the personal computer, video game console, or smartphones and other mobile devices.
MMOs can enable players to cooperate and compete with each other on a large scale, and sometimes to interact meaningfully with people around the world. They include a variety of gameplay types, representing many video game genres.
History
The most popular type of MMOs, and the subgenre that pioneered the category, is the massively multiplayer online role-playing game, which descended from university mainframe computer MUD and adventure games such as Rogue and Dungeon on the PDP-10. These games predate the commercial gaming industry and the Internet, but still featured persistent worlds and other elements of MMOs still used today.The first graphical MMO, and a major milestone in the creation of the genre, was the multiplayer flight combat simulation game Air Warrior by Kesmai on the GEnie online service, which first appeared in 1986. Kesmai later added 3D graphics to the game, making it the first 3D MMO.
Commercial MMORPGs gained acceptance in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The genre was pioneered by the GemStone series on GEnie, also created by Kesmai, and Neverwinter Nights, the first such game to include graphics, which debuted on AOL in 1991.
As video game developers applied MMORPG ideas to other computer and video game genres, new acronyms started to develop, such as MMORTS. MMO emerged as a generic term to cover this growing class of games.
The debuts of The Realm Online, Meridian 59, Castle Infinity,''Ultima Online, Underlight and EverQuest in the late 1990s popularized the MMORPG genre. The growth in technology meant that where Neverwinter Nights in 1991 had been limited to 50 simultaneous players, by 2000 a multitude of MMORPGs was each serving thousands of simultaneous players and led the way for games such as World of Warcraft and EVE Online.
Despite the genre's focus on multiplayer gaming, AI-controlled characters are still common. NPCs and mobs who give out quests or serve as opponents are typical in MMORPGs. AI-controlled characters are not as common in action-based MMOs.
The popularity of MMOs was mostly restricted to the computer game market until the sixth-generation consoles, with the launch of Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast, as well as the emergence and growth of the online service Xbox Live. There have been a number of console MMOs, including EverQuest Online Adventures, and the multi-console Final Fantasy XI. On PCs, the MMO market has always been dominated by successful fantasy MMORPGs.
MMOs have only recently begun to break into the mobile phone market. The first, Samurai Romanesque set in feudal Japan, was released in 2001 on NTT DoCoMo's iMode network in Japan. More recent developments are CipSoft's TibiaME and Biting Bit's MicroMonster, which features online and bluetooth multiplayer gaming. SmartCell Technology is in development of Shadow of Legend, which will allow gamers to continue their game on their mobile device when away from their PC.
Science fiction has also been a popular theme, featuring games such as Mankind, Anarchy Online, Eve Online, Star Wars Galaxies and The Matrix Online.
MMOs emerged from the hard-core gamer community to the mainstream strongly in December 2003, with an analysis in the Financial Times measuring the value of the virtual property in the then-largest MMO, EverQuest, to result in a per-capita GDP of 2,266 dollars, which would have placed the virtual world of EverQuest as the 77th wealthiest nation, on par with Croatia, Ecuador, Tunisia or Vietnam.
World of Warcraft is a dominant MMO with 8-9 million monthly subscribers worldwide. The subscriber base dropped by one million after the expansion Wrath of the Lich King, bringing it to nine million subscribers in 2010, though it remained the most popular Western title among MMOs. In 2008, Western consumer spending on World of Warcraft'' represented a 58% share of the subscription MMO market in 2009. The title has generated over $2.2 billion in cumulative consumer spending on subscriptions from 2005 through 2009.
Virtual economies
Within a majority of the MMOs created, there is virtual currency where the player can earn and accumulate money. The uses for such virtual currency are numerous and vary from game to game. The virtual economies created within MMOs often blur the lines between real and virtual worlds. The result is often seen as an unwanted interaction between the real and virtual economies by the players and the provider of the virtual world. This practice is mostly seen in this genre of games. The two seem to come hand in hand with even the earliest MMOs, such as Ultima Online having this kind of trade: real money for virtual things.The importance of having a working virtual economy within an MMO is increasing as they develop. A sign of this is CCP Games hiring the first real-life economist for its MMO Eve Online to assist and analyze the virtual economy and production within this game.
The results of this interaction between the virtual economy, and our real economy, which is really the interaction between the company that created the game and the third-party companies that want a share of the profits and success of the game. This battle between companies is defended on both sides. The company originating the game and the intellectual property argue that this is in violation of the terms and agreements of the game as well as copyright violation since they own the rights to how the online currency is distributed and through what channels. The case that the third-party companies and their customers defend, is that they are selling and exchanging the time and effort put into the acquisition of the currency, not the digital information itself. They also express that the nature of many MMOs is that they require time commitments not available to everyone. As a result, without external acquisition of virtual currency, some players are severely limited to being able to experience certain aspects of the game.
The practice of acquiring large volumes of virtual currency for the purpose of selling to other individuals for tangible and real currency is called gold farming. Many players who have poured in all of their personal effort resent that there is this exchange between real and virtual economies since it devalues their own efforts. As a result, the term 'gold farmer' now has a very negative connotation within the games and their communities. This slander has unfortunately also extended itself to racial profiling and to in-game and forum insulting.
The reaction from many of the game companies varies. In games that are substantially less popular and have a small player base, the enforcement of the elimination of 'gold farming' appears less often. Companies in this situation most likely are concerned with their personal sales and subscription revenue over the development of their virtual economy, as they most likely have a higher priority to the games viability via adequate funding. Games with an enormous player base, and consequently much higher sales and subscription income, can take more drastic actions more often and in much larger volumes. This account banning could also serve as an economic gain for these large games, since it is highly likely that, due to demand, these 'gold farming' accounts will be recreated with freshly bought copies of the game.
The virtual goods revenue from online games and social networking exceeded US$7 billion in 2010.
In 2011, it was estimated that up to 100,000 people in China and Vietnam are playing online games to gather gold and other items for sale to Western players. While this 'gold farming' is considered to ruin the game for actual players, many rely on 'gold farming' as their main source of income.
However, single player in MMOs is quite viable, especially in what is called 'player vs environment' gameplay. This may result in the player being unable to experience all content, as many of the most significant and potentially rewarding game experiences are events that require large and coordinated teams to complete.
Technical aspect
Most MMOs also share other characteristics that make them different from other multiplayer online games. MMOs host many players in a single game world, and all of those players can interact with each other at any given time. Popular MMOs might have hundreds of players online at any given time, usually on company-owned servers. Non-MMOs, such as Battlefield 1942 or Half-Life, usually have fewer than 50 players online and are usually played on private servers. Also, MMOs usually do not have any significant mods, since the game must work on company servers. There is some debate if a high head-count is a requirement to be an MMO. Some say that it is the size of the game world and its capability to support many players that should matter. For example, despite technology and content constraints, most MMOs can fit up to a few thousand players on a single game server at a time.To support all those players, MMOs need large-scale game worlds, and servers to connect players to those worlds. Some games have all of their servers connected so all players are connected in a shared universe. Others have copies of their starting game world put on different servers, called "shards", for a sharded universe. Shards got their name from Ultima Online, where in the story, the shards of Mondain's gem created the duplicate worlds.
Still, others will only use one part of the universe at any time. For example, Tribes comes with a number of large maps, which are played in rotation. In contrast, the similar title PlanetSide allows all map-like areas of the game to be reached via flying, driving, or teleporting.
MMORPGs usually have sharded universes, as they provide the most flexible solution to the server load problem, but not always. For example, the space simulation Eve Online uses only one large cluster server peaking at over 60,000 simultaneous players.
It is challenging to develop the database engines that are needed to run a successful MMO with millions of players. Many developers have created their own, but attempts have been made to create middleware, software that would help game developers concentrate on their games more than technical aspects. One such piece of middleware is called BigWorld.
An early, successful entry into the field was VR-1 Entertainment, whose Conductor platform was adopted and endorsed by a variety of service providers around the world including Sony Communications Network in Japan; the Bertelsmann Game Channel in Germany; British Telecom's Wireplay in England; and DACOM and Samsung SDS in South Korea. Games that were powered by the Conductor platform included Fighter Wing, Air Attack, Fighter Ace, Evernight, Hasbro Em@ail Games, Towers of Fallow, The SARAC Project, VR1 Crossroads and Rumble in the Void.
Typical MUDs and other predecessor games were limited to about 64 or 256 simultaneous player connections; this was a limit imposed by the underlying operating system, which was usually Unix-like. One of the biggest problems with modern engines has been handling the vast number of players. Since a typical server can handle around 10,000–12,000 players, 4000–5000 active simultaneously, dividing the game into several servers has up until now been the solution. This approach has also helped with technical issues, such as lag, that many players experience. Another difficulty, especially relevant to real-time simulation games, is time synchronization across hundreds or thousands of players. Many games rely on time synchronization to drive their physics simulation as well as their scoring and damage detection.
Although there is no specific limit to where an online multiplayer online game is considered massive, there are broad features that are often used as a metric. Garriott's famed 1997 definition referred to the fundamental architecture shift required to support tens of thousands of concurrent players, which required shifting from individual servers to data centers on multiple continents. Games may have MMO features like large worlds with online persistence but still not generally be considered an MMO, such as Grand Theft Auto Vs online play, while other games like League of Legends have small individual sessions but the global infrastructure requirements often allow for classification as an MMO. The term is often used differently by players who tend to refer to their play experience versus game developers who refer to the engineering experience. MMO game developers tend to require tremendous investments in developing and maintaining servers around the globe, network bandwidth infrastructure often on the order of terabytes per second, and large engineering problems relating to managing data spread between multiple computer clusters.