I’ve been doing MMOs and online worlds a long time. And that means that I’ve written and said a lot of things on the Internet over the years, about designing them.

One of the funny things about reactions to the various vision blogs for Stars Reach is the number of people who have popped up on various MMO forums whose entire impression of me and my design approaches is formed by their experience getting playerkilled in Ultima Online twenty-five years ago. They are often quite confident that I have not adjusted or updated my opinions on griefing at all in the intervening time, despite the fact that Star Wars Galaxies did not have a playerkilling problem like UO’s — and I designed that PvP system personally.

There is something jarring about getting confronted repeatedly with this. Of course, in my mind, I made a pretty definitive statement on playerkilling back in like 2001 or 2002, in an article for the SWG community called “A Philosophical Statement on Playerkilling.”  The key takeaway:

I do not want to ever disappoint people in that way again. People will come to SWG for those things, and I do not want them to discover that they cannot stay and enjoy them because the very freedoms which allow those cool, innovative, exciting features, also allow d00dspeaking giggly jerks to dance roughshod jigs on their virtual corpses.

More recently, as part of putting together Postmortems, I wrote a bunch of new retrospective material on Ultima Online, and most of the lengthy chapter on its playerkilling problems was excerpted and published separately on Game Developer. The quote from that which always sticks in my mind is

In the name of player freedoms, I had put them through a slow-drip torture of two years of experiments with slowly tightening behavior rules, trying to save the emergence while tamping down the bad behavior. The cost was the loss of many hundreds of thousands of players. Ultima Online had churned through more than twice as many players who quit than EverQuest even got as subscribers that year.

Now, none of the above means that I don’t still believe in player freedoms. To my mind, the missed opportunity in UO wasn’t just in moving too slowly on fixing the PKing problem. It was also in giving up on solving the issues of devolved governance.

Probably the best example I can use today is to point at Reddit or Discord. Both of those system use “player governance.” They do it by chopping up the service into smaller areas, and then giving the users a very high degree of control over their areas. And this method has been shown to work pretty well — certainly better than centrally managing all moderation.

MMOs never took this step, though social worlds did. Instead, they pursued the “PK switch” solution: the admins serving as the cops for all the possible forms of bad behavior.

I was completely wrong about this solution not scaling in EverQuest.

But I was completely right about it not scaling to the size of World of Warcraft, XBox Live, or today’s larger games.

The above excerpt ends by pointing out that

…[moderating] was now the admin’s job.


Within five years, they wouldn’t bother.


Where once LegendMUD would have kicked you out for cursing, we got Xbox Live chat with rampant sexism and homophobia.


Where once Ultima Online would have tracked your behavior to try to warn other players of bad apples, we eventually got Twitter, where Nazis can post freely and spam others off the Net.


By giving up on solving the hard problem of freedom co-existing with civility, I fear that the result is that on today’s Internet, we have neither.

Today’s Internet is so much worse in terms of behavior, absolutely everywhere, that people do not realize how bad it has gotten compared to what we once had. And the effect in the virtual worlds has been to instead remove freedoms, remove the ability to interact, even, in order to try to provide safety.

Anyway… that’s what today’s Stars Reach post is largely about, along with the larger question of what the game is and is not. It’s unabashedly an MMO that is about other people, and not one that will cocoon you away from other players entirely.