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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   4477 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 16, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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How would you devise an MMORPG to hypothetically maximize for the most rewarding and positive social interactions and bonding? Some thoughts:

  • You want to make untrustworthy, treacherous, "defect-opting" player behavior as easy as possible. This is paradoxical, but knowing that players always have the option to backstab you (and be greatly rewarded for it) means that players are encouraged to form deeper than surface bonds. It wouldn’t be enough that a player has the correct stat or checks the OK box, you need to know him personally to trust him and to cooperate. The calculus would be that cooperation is only the best option in the longterm, whereas defection is the best option in the short-term (and abundantly so) and with no legible reputation-meter to check a person’s prior defections (easy name / face changes).

  • Similar to the above, add select highly-scarce player rewards that can only be obtained through longterm social trust. Dungeons in games like WoW do not require this level of trust, because they lacks the heavy punitive cost of trusting the wrong person, as Ninja Looting isn’t as simple as the olden days.

  • Cooperative questing where verbal call-outs are essential. This is something FPS games do pretty well, because the encounters are always unique so verbal call-outs are the only way to defeat enemies. In modern WoW it’s mostly following a pre-determined sequence of buttons.

  • More team mechanisms which show on-screen that the characters are benefitting each other. An animation for giving another player where you see something handed, with a happy rewarding jingle and expressions of kindness, an ornate healing animation, an animation for repairing, animations for rescuing, animations for pulling wounded teammates… this is a trivial way for hack our primate brains to sense greater bonds.

  • A group singing animation for buffs. Again, very primal, and very trivial to implement (keystrokes for notes).

  • Un-googleable (un-AIable) quest items, where you must find a limited amount of real players with the item and bargain with them to receive it by helping them with something. An algorithm can determine which player would be most aided by your particular class / race / profession.

  • Quest plotlines which articulate & extol brotherhood and camaraderie. Just a clever way to make us feel stronger bonds with other players (eg while questing with them, the quest plotlines themselves are showing great cooperations etc).

This was a fun aspect of vanilla WoW which afaik has died out in modern games. It’s a fun thought experiment.

I think the first point is wrong, gamers respond to incentives, and you need to worry about attracting the right people in the first place. And a game with betrayal mechanics will attract gamers that want to betray.

I think what is needed is downtime. A time and place for people to just talk and shoot the shit. Hopefully while doing something fun or productive feeling. Humans are naturally social creatures, they just need a space for it to happen.

Star Wars Galaxies nailed this community aspect in a way no other MMO has before or since. There were entire entertainer and doctor and crafter classes that didn't participate in combat at all. And because it was an entirely player-driven economy where almost every weapon and piece of armor and stat buff had to be crafted or traded between players, specialization and cooperation were heavily encouraged. I probably spent more time hanging out with people in cantinas and engaging in productive, mutually beneficial commerce than I did exploring or fighting.

EVE online was somewhat similar. Lot of activities in it were time gated and required you to be paying attention but didn't require you to actively do anything. So socializing with a group of people that were all paying attention was perfect.

FFXIV does most of these, excluding the ungooglable and (arguably) group singing, and sometimes by accident (ie, penalties for poor selection are less because of ninjaing, but more because there are many ways to exploit groups to get a token or get a second chance at a loot roll which will cost that group a lot because of how the raid system gives out chests). It's pretty good community-wise, though I think there's as much coming from how damn long the main story quest is rather than what extent it's powered by Friendship, and the twitchiness makes it hard for most groups to have conversations while playing higher-rank content.

I have bad news for you. Nearly every single one of those qualities existed in pre-WoW MMOs. It did not encourage rewarding and positive social interactions like you imagine it would. The flaw in all these "And then they'll have no choice but to develop deeper bonds and trust each other!" theories is that users can just start a new account. They might even have one account for griefing and another account for teamwork. They might swoop in with their griefing account in a coup de grace moment using insider information from their pro-social account. This was basically how I remember Ultima Online and Everquest playing like, and how Dark Age of Camelot looked watching some of my old LAN party buddies play.

There was a time in Dark Age of Camelot in particular that was brutal. I might get some of the details wrong, or maybe even have the wrong game entirely. Could have been Asheron's Call. But I think it was DAoC. There was some highly coveted spawn point that had a small percent chance to drop an extremely coveted rune that was essential to the game economy. The various guilds had basically agreed on a turn system so that access to the spawn point was distributed fairly, and enforced it vigorously. Any line jumpers or griefers became kill on sight to this alliance of guilds.

Anyways, my old LAN friends somehow managed to jump the line, murder the guild who's turn it was, steal the rune, and then somehow still frame the other guild as the guilty party. The consequences were quite dire for those poor bastards, and my friends gloated about it for the entire weekend.

No, people are rat bastards, and no amount of encouragement can get defect-bots to stop being defect-bots. Not in real life, and especially not in virtual worlds where you can just put on a new face effortlessly.

Not in real life, and especially not in virtual worlds where you can just put on a new face effortlessly.

I played a 'game' that had absolutely no rules (no pve zones, no group size limits, no spawn protection, no base protection etc) except for "don't hack or bribe admins" and ... while there were 'defect bots' they ended up on everyone's shit list, to the point you might get a reward if you found them and reported them to other players. And of course, bribing admins did happen a few times and there was even a touching occurrence when every sworn enemy in the game dropped the war they were fighting and united to keep eradicating a Chinese group of losers who were somehow related to then owners of the game and had an admin help them with cheats and cheated with impunity. The admin gave it up after the fourth time they rolled back a server for the group :D.

Defect bots, the ones who didn't quit the game in the end had a small group of their own, hated by everyone.

Didn't have anything to do with accounts, really. Lot of 'elite' players were perma-banned several times or because large groups were usually using duping exploits (and the biggest offenders got admin nuked) or had some idiot sell their stuff for real money, which often led to the entire group being deleted and permabanned. Which meant they had to spend $12 on serial keys and rebuild for a month with help of friends who escaped the ban.

Unless you were a known quantity (e.g. vouched for by someone trustworthy) only a fool would really trust you. Nobody would trust you with anything but most menial crap if you didn't use voice chat ofc.

people are rat bastards and no amount of encouragement can get defect-bots to stop being defect-bots

I have faith that that there are ways to do this… We just have to be very clever…

It's not exactly multiplayer in that sense, but I suggest taking a look at Death Stranding. The game's main theme is how cooperation is better than isolation, and the gameplay is tuned to deliver that message. When you first enter a region, the game forces you through a painful slog with pretty much no help from other players. Then slowly as you do deliveries for NPCs in the area the game allows more and more player built infrastructure in your game. When you use someone's infrastructure you can spam "likes" on it, which the creator of the infrastructure might see; those do essentially nothing (not completely but pretty much) except convey your gratitude. Eventually, you'll find yourself building roads or zipline networks through regions you don't have to stay in anymore because you just want to be helpful.

The first half of these are satisfied by games like DayZ and Escape from Tarkov. Tarkov is already sort of an MMO. Recently, Arc Raiders has added to the pile of games with Tarkov mechanics.

Oversimplifying the question, it really does have to be "great long term rewards are completely contingent on cooperating with others repeatedly."

Some mechanic like "if you successfully complete one dungeon with a given team, you can all choose to roll the rewards from the win into an 'investment' in the next dungeon run that will increase overall payout for the next success, and you can keep rolling those wins over until certain special items/top tier loot are available."

And then defection has to have a decent chance of severe and lasting punishment.

There is the paradox, though, when you have PvP games with Factions, the players want to fight other players, other factions, so you can't make your game too utopic or the fights won't happen, at least not as often as you'd like.

And on that note, the whole issue is that a game is (supposedly) optimizing for 'fun' for the players (and money for the devs) and players will have divergent ideas of what they find 'fun.' Many will find griefing others fun, some will find it fun to play a lone wolf, some just want to kill things. I don't know if its 'possible' to design the game from the ground up such that cooperation is consistently the most fun thing a player can do most of the time.

I've sometimes thought about game design where the factions aren't just different aesthetically or with different perks, weapons, powers, etc., but they are also different ideologically, in a way that is enforced by the game's code.

You can have the Capitalist faction where players are free to trade with their fellow players, enter contracts determining how to split loot in advance, and accumulate unlimited amounts of resources to yourself.

The Communists where there's an 'equality of outcome' mechanic so that everyone gets rewards divided up "according to their need" to equalize everyone's capabilities and wealth, and presumably a HARD cap (voted on by players) to the max wealth any one person can ever get.

Monarchists where all rewards belong to the 'King' and he bestows them as he prefers (unless deposed by an underling, I guess).

Fascists who can each control their own wealth but the wealth can be seized or a player 'executed' for the good of the faction.

Pure Democracy where every player gets a vote on every decision, and none are allowed to opt-out.

Gerontocracy where the most 'senior' players get to have outsized political and economic power.

Technocracy where players with the highest skills points in certain areas get to make all decisions regarding those areas.

Hell, have a Degenerate Gamblocracy where all loot and rewards are divided solely by games of chance.

I feel like there's probably a Minecraft mod out there that does something like this.

I would like to see this so we can measure which system is best for resource acquisition, development, and player enjoyment

Some of these seem very similar to EVE online?

This was exactly my thought, and the elements led to very emergent social situations. No dancing emotes needed, just severe financial consequences for leaving yourself open to being backstabbed etc.

Yeah and the Probe when you join corps (guilds)!

Wdym 'probe' ?

Because corp membership involves a decent amount of trust there's usually a thorough review of ones API keys to join any corporation worth anything.

It's humorously compared to a thorough colonoscopy.

API keys?

A way to look at player account information outside of the game. In EVE that means seeing income and spending, skills, and see in game messages etc.

Every character/account can export an API key that allows anyone to access things like in-game messages, what skills your character has trained and to which level, your previous employment history, your wallet transactions.

High end corp/alliances then run the data through some filters to flag risk factors. For example, they find some suspicious transactions to a character in an enemy corp.

Huh, that's neat. In Ark there was nothing like that, you had to just know people.

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