His core complaint is that STO is fundamentally not a massively multiplayer game. The descriptive quip he uses (which it sounds like he’s pulled from the forums, or other player responses) is “moderately multiplayer”; players nominally exist in the same world but have very little interaction with each other. I haven’t played STO myself, but from what friends of mine have said this definitely rings true. This isn’t necessarily bad, though. We’re seeing a significant broadening of the “massively multiplayer” category. We’re seeing a lot more deviation from the World of Warcraft style design. Worlds like Guild Wars are somewhat less multiplayer than WoW; outside of cities, the world is entirely instanced. You can even skip the leveling process entirely and just start with a top level character for use in player versus player combat that looks a lot more like Halo or Counterstrike in format than WoW.

Coming from the other end of this multiplayer-ness continuum, we also see games like Sony’s new MAG, where teams of 128 players are common. MAG even has a lot of the character progression mechanics we expect to see in MMOs. As you play more, more possible combat roles unlock for you, you move higher up the command chain, your character begins to look more powerful, and so on. At that scale, MAG is essentially a scaled-up version of battlegrounds in WoW (which never have more than 40 players on a team). All that seems to be missing is a coherent world to live in between matches.

So what is it that actually makes a game an MMO, if what are nominally MMOs are looking less like what we’re used to, and non-MMOs are looking more than more like MMOs? Should we fault STO for not looking like the MMOs we expect? I don’t think the moderately-multiplayer place on the continuum that STO occupies is necessarily doomed to be un-fun. STO’s real sin is that having few opportunities for player interaction is just un-Star Trek. The world of Star Trek is one that’s very strongly focused on the interpersonal dynamics of the people involved, not relentless combat. A game that required people to work together to achieve common goals – or even just to peacefully coexist on a ship – would be a much better fit with the fiction of the world. EVE offers some of the social part of this vision, but it’s a cold, harsh, and deadly world. But I don’t think it would be at all unreasonable to imagine an STO where players served on ships together, worked towards industrial or combat goals that benefited their faction in different ways, and had some of the utopian flavor of the Trek universe. That’s the real tragedy, I think – Cryptic blew their chance to make a game that was more than thin Star Trek skin onto a game design that it just doesn’t fit.

A pod - the last barrier between you and explosive decompression.

After the structure of the world itself, perhaps the most important decision a virtual world designer makes is about the nature of death. How death happens, and the consequences for the dead form the foundation of most of the mechanics in the world.

In most virtual worlds, death is pretty inconsequential. When you die in World of Warcraft, you reappear in the nearest graveyard in non-corporeal form and can either pay money to resurrect instantly, or you can run back to your body (conveniently shown on your map) to resurrect there for free. So death is just a time penalty. You’re forced to do something menial and time consuming (running back to your body) to encourage you not to do risky things that might lead to death. So in World of Warcraft (and in most worlds) this penalty is just a matter of minutes.

In EVE, death is a very different matter. Ships in EVE are a sort of russian doll setup. The ship contains the pod which contains the actual player’s body. So death happens in two phases. As your ship takes damage, your shields get worn down first, then your armor, and then finally the structure of the ship itself. When your ship explodes, it’s gone. Forever. Some of the modules you’ve equipped on the ship will be left behind, but you won’t be around to pick them up. They’re there mostly as spoils for the winners of the battle. This loss hurts a lot – you can see in my visualization of ship prices, you’re losing much, much more than a few minutes of work. Even the smallest ships will take more time to earn the money to pay for than it would take you to run back to your body in World of Warcraft. There is some consolation, though. Most of the time you’re flying a ship that is well insured, so you’re only losing like 40% of the ship price instead of 100%, but T2 ships can’t really be insured, so they really hurt to lose.

When your ship explodes, you’re left in your pod. Your pod has very little health, and will explode pretty much as soon as someone looks at you the wrong way. If your pod gets blown up, you lose that particular clone. All pilots have a bunch of clones, so losing one isn’t too costly. What can hurt is implants. You can install expensive items inside the head of a clone to give it special abilities. These implants do things like increase the speed at which you learn new skills, or confer combat benefits of various kinds. These can be quite expensive. In some cases, they cost substantially more than the ship itself. Managing to kill someone’s pod (known as “podding”) is usually tricky, but you have a chance of costing them quite a bit of money, so people really enjoy pulling it off. There’s also a tiny chance that the person who’s pod you’re blowing up hasn’t been keeping it “up to date.” This is kind of obscure, but every so often you have to pay to get a nicer clone — your character is older and has more skills, so needs a more expensive clone to hold them all. If you forget to do that and get podded, you can easily lose a month or more of training. This is quite rare, though, and such a stiff penalty that people tend to remember to stay up to date.

This is all a long way to say that in EVE, death hurts. It can be brutal and fast and it stings. For me, at least, my ship’s you’re-about-to-explode alarms really get my heart pumping. So why play a game where death is so awful? Paradoxically, it makes the rest of the game way more meaningful. When death matters, people will do a lot more to avoid it. More than anything, death is what pushes pilots together. Death is less scary (and less likely) when you face it in groups. It has geopolitical implications, too. If death didn’t cost money, the entire infrastructure of war wouldn’t make sense. Losing a war is expensive for the pilots in your fleets, and makes it hard to sustain serious losses for a long time. To assuage the financial implications, most alliances have a reimbursement program to keep their pilots flying (and losing) ships as much as possible. Still, alliances that go on long losing streaks tend to start shedding members because they’re a) not having fun anymore, and b) getting quite poor. If death was just a matter of five or ten minutes work, war would be nothing but an attendance competition.

New Eden, with systems sized (and colored) based on the number of pilots in system in the last 24 hours.

More than any other MMO company, CCP has tried to turn the challenges of single-sharded-ness into game mechanics. EVE has never been a world where you go to experience the “content” of a beautifully designed and imagined world. In EVE, the content is the players, and players seek each other out to have new experiences and tell new stories.

These design decisions create a very different kind of world than he franchise model of World of Warcraft. First of all, it means you can automatically play with all your friends. There’s no negotiation of which particular version of the world you want to meet up in, and no having to pick between your high school friends and college friends, who play in different places.

There are global implications for single-sharding, too. You’re playing with people from around the world. In my most recent fleet op, I could easily hear Australian, Indian, British, Eastern European, and many varieties of American accents. There are parts of the EVE world that are known to not speak English; Russian is probably the most dominant non-English language. Time zones are also really important. In a single-sharded world, there are always people playing, and war is a 24 hour affair. Most corporations try to have players in all the major time zone blocks (EU / US / AUS, traditionally), so if something bad happens, there are people around to deal with it.

Number of simultaneously connected users by hour (GMT)

The nature of news and celebrity in EVE is also quite different as a result of single-sharding. Famous players and organizations are famous throughout EVE, not just in their small shard. When there are big political events like GoonSwarm disbanding, they’re more than just stories for most players – they have a big impact on a huge number of players. In contrast, news in World of Warcraft is primarily about changes to the world itself, not things that players in the world actually did. Indeed, there are few things players can do to change their shard in a meaningful way. Even if there were, there are many fewer people would care about what had changed.

Although this model has lots of exciting implications, it’s hardly all sunshine and puppies. Instancing and sharding tend to provide a more consistent and structured experience for people. We’ve talked recently about the clash between so-called carebears and pirates. In a sharded model, you could easily separate those populations onto different servers where the rules about when you can attack people are different. World of Warcraft distinguishes its shard as “Player versus Player” (PvP) or “Player versus Environment” (PvE). If you want to be protected from other players, just pick a PvE shard and you’ll be able to do quests to your hearts content.

Same goes for instancing; if you’re in a dungeon in World of Warcraft, you’re completely insulated from the outside world. Only the players you’ve explicitly invited can be there. In EVE, being in a mission area provides only slight protection. There are lots of ways for unfriendly players to cause trouble for you in your mission.

This is no accident. The richness of EVE’s world depends on the interplay between all these different kinds of players and play styles. The complicated social relationship between pirates and miners and 0.0 pilots is part of what makes EVE so wonderful. The culture is rich and huge and you can engage with it from a variety of different perspectives as your character ages. But a lot of this wouldn’t be possible with a sharded model. I think it’s a property of good game design that the mechanics fit together in complimentary ways. EVE’s choice of single-sharding is a great example of that – it has a big impact on how all the rest of the game mechanics work, from mining, production, and mission running to 0.0 alliance warfare.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good.

Like the gods of creation stories, designers of a new virtual world face a fundamental cosmological question: how will the world be organized? What will the natural laws of the world be? How will people move around it and effect other residents of that world? These questions encompass the entire problem of designing a virtual world, but the very first question you have to decide about is how many worlds you’re going to make.

In the beginning, there was only one model, and it’s difficult to describe it because anything else seems so alien: every visitor to a particular virtual world like LambdaMOO was visiting the same version of LambdaMOO and could see any other visitor to LambdaMOO. This seems so obvious as to be confusing; if you plan to meet someone at a local coffee shop, you will end up in the same place.

This model quickly fell apart, though. As virtual worlds gained popularity, it became harder and harder to fit everyone into one world together. So like a coffee shop owner that realizes she could profitably open another location and start a franchise system, virtual world designers developed a new way to organize their universes. Instead of having just one world, virtual worlds started having multiple copies of their world. These copies are typically called “shards” or “realms”.

Unlike a coffee shop, it seems like you could just make a virtual world bigger to fit more people, right? There are no real estate constraints online to hinder expansion. Instead of physical constraints, virtual worlds that want to grow face two related problems. The first is technical. In general, the bigger a virtual crowd gets the more unresponsive the world becomes for everyone. Imagine that every time you move your character, you have to tell everyone else nearby about every step your character takes. If everyone’s moving at the same time, the number of messages for everyone to tell everyone else that they’re moving rises very quickly. So when you have a world with lots of people in it, you’re usually really scared that they all end up in the same place at once because then that area slows to a crawl as it tries to pass messages between everyone in the room.

The second problem is one of design: how do you keep people from all going to the same places at the same times? You have to give people lots of places to go that are interesting and lots of places to do things that everyone needs to do, like go shopping, so they never fill up too much.

A game like World of Warcraft sort of punts on the second issue. You can get away with having a laggy, unresponsive world for things like shopping because it’s not a particular immersive experience anyway. Plus, players get smart at regulating their visits to busy places like that to avoid heavy traffic. The first problem is harder to deal with. If there’s a really important mission that everyone wants to do, how do you handle 1000 people who want to do that mission at the same time?

The traditional answer to this problem is to do the franchising trick again. In this context, it’s known as “instancing.” If I want to go do a popular mission with some friends, the world creates a copy of the mission area that’s just for us. These areas typically have a fixed number of people who can be in them, which solves the messaging problem from earlier; if you can set a ceiling for the number of people who can simultaneously participate in something, you can just design experiences for a number of people you know you can easily handle.

Instancing solves another problem, too – griefing. When doing a high stakes, high risk task, there are lots of opportunities for a malicious player to ruin other people’s chances. Instancing separates these tasks from the rest of the world. You choose who comes with you into the instance, so you’re largely safe from unfriendly players.

Almost all modern worlds use shards or realms to split up their player base, and almost all modern worlds use some form of instancing. Some worlds, like Guild Wars, are nearly entirely instanced, and the only shared spaces are towns. Perhaps the only other world that doesn’t use shards is Second Life, although they set hard limits on the number of people in an area, too, so essentially they have the same problem, they just choose to avoid it.

EVE doesn’t use realms or shards at all, and uses only a lightweight form of limited instancing for missions (which don’t play nearly as central a role as they do in other worlds). The result is that when you look at the EVE login screen and it says 35,000 logged in pilots, that’s 35,000 people you can talk to, shoot at, and team up with. If you want to put 1000 people in a system together, you can. It’s laggy, but this kind of flexibility has a major impact on the kind of world EVE has become.

This article is continued in a second, more EVE-specific, part.