Future MMO: Super-Persistance

Someday, WoW will die. It's not really relevant how, at least to me. What is interesting to me is, what will take it's place. I believe that it is going to take a lot more than just a slick new engine with next generation graphics, or a new or re-imagined setting. It is going to have to combine elements of all the latest successful MMOs. This is going to be a recurring article, I'll cover a new idea each installment. **** For this installment, I'm going to cover something I call super-persistence, and though its simple in thought, it requires a huge burden on the servers that the game is based on. The idea is that an MMO is a virtual world, that's obviously the holy grail of the industry. But though the game manuals say that WoW and EVE and Warhammer and Age of Conan are "Persistent worlds," the truth is that they are not, any time a person in the world just disappears when a player logs of, that is ruining persistence. Every character has to remain 'in-play' even after the player logs off. What this character does while they are not being controlled is obviously just as important as it is for them to just be there. You cant have the character just stand in place, or sleep, because that's really no better than having them just disappear. They have to act, and react.

EVE Online actually already has the model down, your character's growth and power is based on real world time, (it would be like a WoW character gaining real experience when logged off,) so the logical conclusion is that the character is training. In addition, crafting in EVE takes time, on the scale of days, and time spent logged off counts towards this task. I am not entirely convinced this model is good, but some element of time effecting the character needs to be in place (more on this in a future article.)

So, there has so be some mechanism for you to set before logging off that informs the server what your character should be doing while you are away. Here are a couple of examples of how this time can be spent in this future MMO;

• Repair: You would set your away time to be spent on repair and rearming, so instead of a gold cost for upkeep (WoW model,) it is instead a time cost. If you select this option, you would repair your gear by a certain percent each hour, and your character would be animated as sharpening swords, hammering dents out of shields, sewing rips in leather, mending mail, and so on.
• Tradeskill: Much like repair, except you are crafting, rather than repairing.
• Selling: Your character would set up shop, but be careful, your character may get hauled off to jail if they don't have a permit!
• Travel: To facilitate this, the future MMO would need to adopt a macro-world model (a topic I will cover later,) where travel from some places to others takes too much time to be played, you would instead spend your time away from the computer doing it.

Basically, time spent logged off could be spent on things that you wouldn't want to do while playing, either because they require no input, or take too long. However, in all my excitement for super-persistence, I forgot to mention a big reason it is important. It reinforces the concept of rest, and community. If your character remains in play while you are away, you cant just leave him in the middle of a battle-field, this is both dangerous and not restful. You have to go back to your home, which can obviously be a number of things, from an inn to a true residence. Either way, your character is there, in the world, helping to fill and populate it, even while away. The server could even regulate NPC activity based on character activity, the more characters in the city, logged on or not, the less NPCs needed to help make the city feel real.

The idea, as always, is to create a virtual world that is both immersive and fun. Super-persistence has to be a part of this process, because it is the most obvious sign of a fake world, people don't disappear, and even with a magic world, where they can teleport around, they are always somewhere.