Project & Story

Sometimes playing MMOs appears more like science than fun (besides, exactly the reason why we started out with Coobico) – you need to memorize effects and combos of weapons, spells, monsters and attacks. You need to learn and stick to role behaviours like “tank”, “damage-dealer” and the like to be able to blend in with parties of other players. And to communicate with them, of course, you need to learn the MMOs’ specific jargon of abbreviations (also called “leet-speak”). Earthtimes has a posting “‘4/6 lfm tank and dd’ - The jargon of online gaming”, which explains a few of these terms to the N00bs. Techrepublik has much older, but more exhaustive list.

Second Life saw in-world banking activities throughout the past years with close to thirty lending institutions setting up their “business” in SL. A lot of them seemed to be dubious, offering unsustainably high returns, even resembling lendings-schemes where you are prompted by badly written emails to donate money to some third world bank account.
One of the most prominent cases was the demise of Ginko Financial in August 2007. Being founded by a member called “Portercarrero” (possibly one Andre Sanchez from Sao Paolo), and initially heartily embraced by Linden Labs’ founder Philip Rosedale, Ginko offered a 100 percent rate of interest (talking about unsustainably high returns). The rate quickly dropped to 44 percent yield per annum, all along with a daily withdrawal cap of approx. USD 19. Being cornered by intellectual property lawyer Benjamin Duranske, Portercarrero came to admit that he could not cover withdrawals. The affected residents went hyperbolic after this news, but it was too late already: the money was gone, after all a sum of around USD 750,000. Portercarrero had changed the corporate legal status of Ginko, yielding only pennies on the dollar. The Ginko depositors reacted with a class action lawsuit, but it’s highly doubtful if they will see their money again. (jackmyers.com has an insightful report about Ginko).

Yesterday, as a reaction to all these events, Linden Labs announced to effectively close down all banking-activities from 22nd of January on for non-official financial institutions:

“As of January 22, 2008, it will be prohibited to offer interest or any direct return on an investment (whether in L$ or other currency) from any object, such as an ATM, located in Second Life, without proof of an applicable government registration statement or financial institution charter…
Usually, we don’t step in the middle of Resident-to-Resident conduct – letting Residents decide how to act, live, or play in Second Life. But these “banks” have brought unique and substantial risks to Second Life, and we feel it’s our duty to step in…“

Sometimes it seems to be necessary to protect players from themselves. However, with Linden Labs’ pledge “We ask that between now and then, those who operate these “banks” settle up on any promises they have made to other Residents and, of course, honor valid withdrawals,“ probably the exodus of the scammers is ushered in: Nobody can keep these operations from just grabbing the money and run. Even for a honorable business, it would be close to impossible to settle their accounts if the amount of disbursements is around tenth or hundreds of thousands of dollars to thousands of clients in just two weeks.

After reaching a certain achievement-level, characters can choose to obtain a new class of quests: temp-jobs. Such temp-jobs are picked up like normal quests, but they stay within your quest-roster for a longer time (remember, you can keep several quests on the backburner) – they remain in your roster until you decide to drop them again. As long as a temp-job is active, a character will earn money and experience based on the job-type. For example, a guard on patrol will earn additional money and experience by defeating cursed monsters. Other exemplary temp-jobs are archeologist, merchant or bandit (sic!).

While this is a great opportunity to boost earnings for reccuring tasks, temp-jobs have a downside, too: they occupy your quest-roster – probably when you like to pick up new important quests.

In fact, the quest for building up your own settlement is just a temp-job, too. After picking up such a settler’s job, characters earn additional money and experience for expanding their own village.

Around christmas-time articles about the popular Chinese MMORPG 征途 Zhengtu Online circulated on Chinese websites (they supposingly got a userbase of several million, and a net income of US $39 million in Q3, 2007). The issue didn’t seemed to be all that interesting at that moment, but it reached several large US-blogs like Kotaku around new year, and thus was getting more and more coverage in the past days. Before leaving comments scattered here and there, we can also discuss the issue here, right?
The original article by Cao Yunwu – which is quite positively received in the western blogosphere (Worlds in Motion: “absolutely fasinating”, Kotaku: “it’s a really, really great article”) – featured a critical report about how players of ZT Online were taken to the cleaner’s by its business-model. It raised some hubaloo, but only after it was wiped from the Internet suddenly, making people wonder if this was all a publicity-stunt by ZT Online’s company Giant Interactive.

Go read the article “Gambling your life away in ZT Online” yourself to get the full picture, Danwei has an english transcription.   

While the article is intriguing and – besides being a bit lengthy – quite absorbing, it uses a cheap trick to build up its enthralling atmosphere: it consecutively uses the term “The System” (which is also its original headline) as a way to describe the game and its controls:

“In China’s hottest online game right now, players encounter a “system” that executes a seductive control. Though unseen, this “system” is omnipresent. It a virtual yet real monopolist. “Not a leaf moves in this kingdom if I don’t know about it.“ The voice of Pinochet, former dictator of Chile, echoes softly though this virtual world.“

This technique builds up images of a faceless orwellian ...well… system, controlling all of its members in ZT Online and their wellbeing and freedom of speech. If you cut to the chase, the whole report is about power-gamers, who are paying through their noses in their arms’ race by Giant Interactive’s business-model for ZT Online. It’s important to use the term business-model here: Gamers like Lu “The Queen” Yang are not engulfed by the Matrix or something similar. They chose to play a game with a specific business-model, on a market with plenty of competition and choices – both Western and Asian (even if Southern Weekend (南方周末), a popular tabloid in China puts it in a somewhat xenophobic reaction: “‘Chinese gamers are an unwelcome species on European and American servers,‘ said a game manager who once worked on World of Warcraft… For those ‘pedantic’ European and American gamers, Chinese players are like fearsome pagans. ‘European and American games do not encourage unlimited superiority of power; they put more of an emphasis on balance and cooperative support.‘“).

The whole coverage pinpoints one important issue though: nowadays, the majority of massive online worlds declare themselves as “free to play”, even though you eventually find out in the end, that without spending additional money, the game keeps you at the status of an expandable decorative extra for the premium members around you.
Just to make it clear: when we are talking about Coobico is going to be free, we are not talking about that free, we mean the other free, like in “free of charge”.

What were your most favorite MMOs in 2007? According to GigaOm’s Blake Snow in “GigaOM Top 10 Most Popular MMOs”, World of Warcraft, Habbo Hotel and Runescape are leading the pack, subscriber-wise. Runner-ups further down the list include Club Penguin, Webkinz and Guild Wars – you might object with the compilation of competitors here like some commenters who are missing virtual worlds like Maple Story, Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom, Final Fantasy XI and so on. But it’s already quite a smorgasbord of massive avatar chats and hardcore-mmorpgs. It’s pretty much a comparison of apples to oranges raising the question of a more detailed definition of the word MMO (massively multiplayer online world/game). Do Habbo Hotel and Webkinz fall into the definition of a multiplayer game? It’s a similar problem like the compilation of the top 10 social networks (where sites like Gaia Online had their place, too). 

An accurate classification will get more and more important, the more online-worlds position themselves on the thin line between game, social network and massive avatar chat – the very genremix Coobico is set out to conquer, too. This is going to be especially important for the media and advertisement industry.
According to an industry forecast for 2008 from 45 industry leaders (done by Virtual World News, download the PDF here), a massive boom and fragmentation of virtual worlds and their genres is going to happen in 2008. Wagner James Au gazes into the crystal ball in “My 2008 Gaming and Online Worlds Predictions” and shares the same opinion:
“The GigaOM Top 10 Most Popular MMOs from June tracked some 35 million active members, and was already in serious need of an upward revision a few months later. I’m working on one now, but if I had to hazard a rough guess, I’d say it’s approaching 50 million. (Which means it beat Gartner’s oft-cited estimate by four years.) Given the ceaseless growth, investment dollars, and new startups (especially for kid-oriented MMOs), it’s reasonable to expect that level of growth will continue next year.“

It’s going to be an interesting (and industrious) new year. Anyway, a happy and fruitful 2008 from the Coobico development team to everybody.

As you can see, our mascot Coobrick is already in the mood for Christmas, which is not entirely true for all of us. In fact, work for Coobico at our development-cubicle is going on in full swing, even during this season. Anyway, we wish you a Merry Christmas, Joyeux Noël, frohe Weihnachten, feliz Navidad and 聖誕快樂, and we prepared a new wallpaper for you as a little christmas-goodie. As usual, it comes in three different sizes: Medium (1024 * 768), Large (1600 * 1200) and Widescreen (1920 * 1200). 

In last time’s Backend-article we introduced our chat-server “Smartfox”. This time we are going to take a look at Macromedia Flash. Two actionscript-frameworks are our weapons of choice for developing Coobico: Fuse and Pixlib.

Animations are almost exclusively scripted, powered by Moses Gunesch’s ubiquitous Fuse Kit. Fuse is a real powerhouse when it comes to scripted animations and filters, albeit a bit resources-hungry. Coobico therefore mainly relies on Fuse’s underlying ZigoEngine.
Flash has always had as its nucleus animation and motion, and its player’s performance has been greatly improved over the past years; still, Flash is painfully slow when it comes to animating objects over time, especially when developing a game depending on scrolling large areas of the screen at possibly high frame-rates. Thus, our focal point is fast and lesser cpu-hungry code – even though this eventually leads to less elegant solutions. 

All other tasks are being conducted by Pixlib. Pixlib is an Actionscript-framework developed by Francis Bourre, designed to support event handling, managing preloading, data holders, data structures and patterns implementations, dealing with XML and a lot more. As Oddlyonward describes: “What makes Pixlib different from many frameworks is its extensibility.  It has been called the ‘swiss army knife’ of frameworks because it is very open-ended.  While some frameworks are very dialed-in for specific uses (rich internet applications, game development etc.), Pixlib can be put to almost any use.“.
Pixlib’s architecture is quite convincing, especially the model of its front-controller, which virtually pulls the strings of all events and commands on the clients’ side – it’s a great way to keep your myriad of functions in order and under control. The only let-down is Pixlib’s nearly non-existent documentation – a disadvantage it shares with more or less every Flash-framework currently to be found. 
By the way, an Actionscript 3.0-version of Pixlib called LowRA is currently on its’ way. A few informations can be found here.

Here are some recommended links about Fuse and Pixlib:
OSFlash has a collection of links about Pixlib. Everything about Fuse can be found at MosesSupposes.

Nex time we are going to talk about our level-editor…

In case you missed it (we nearly did): GigaOm, acclaimed tech-related media-network, reports about Coobico in their recent article “Attack of the Casual Game Sites”. Wagner James Au writes:
“Visually appealing with an inventive concept, this has a good chance of attracting the same creative teen gamers that made Gaia Online such a hit, as well as older gamers with less time for the hardcore strategy games they used to love.“

Events are going to be an interesting and important game-mechanism for home-owners and competing settlers. Events are occurrences affecting a whole settlement – for better or worse, events can have positive and negative effects on an affected settlement. They hook into Coobico’s quest-system. An example for a positive event: during a “Goldrush” characters will earn more money for an accomplished quest. A negative example is “Great Fire”, which blocks the entrance to all buildings in a settlement until a certain amount of freshwater was disbursed to cancel the event.

So where do events come from? They are invoked by geomancers and alchemists, players can purchase events from such nonplayer-characters – but they don’t come cheap. There will at least be two shops where events can be “bought”. Any settlement can only be affected by one event at a time, so settlers might want to buy positive events for their villages here and there to block out negative ones.

Mashable covers a Nielsen Online metric about the current top 10 social networks, traffic-wise. No big wonder about first and second place: even though MySpace’s growth-rate is waning at 7 percent, their number of 57 million visitors is still more than twice as large as Facebook’s, ranking on place two. Another interesting aspect of this measurement is AOL, whose websites are loosing traffic by the leaps and bounds.
Mashable’s Adam Ostrow points out that Bebo didn’t made it into the Top 10 – according to Nielsen, they saw around 1.7 million visitors in November. Seems like the ongoing hype about Bebo is somewhat inflated? By the way, our (slightly empty) Bebo-Profile is here.
 
The Top 10 of social networks poses the question of what exactly is considered a social network, at least to Nielsen Online? AOL’s Hometown and Microsoft’s Live Spaces turn up in this list, even though they might better be described as a collection of blogs and online diaries. Then the list features Club Penguin, which – besides being a social chat-app, of course – does not have any social networking features like profiles and the like. Habbo Hotel on the other hand, which has added such features, misses here. Since their userbase is allegedly beyond 4 million, they were either not considered as a social network or couldn’t live up to their own claims.