Stars Reach’s Raph Koster on MMO trust, fear, and freedom: ‘We understand how nervous players are about griefing’ (2024)

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Regular MOP readers know that our commenters have already spilled a lot of ink about Raph Koster’s in-development MMORPG Stars Reach – and he’s clearly reading it as he’s been down there in the comments with you. And we’re guessing that the latest dev blog on the game might be inspired directly by some of your concerns since he quoted at least one of our commenters in his latest attempts to explain the game.

First, Koster breaks down the game into a simple list of what the game is and what it isn’t: It is a game meant to be inviting, beautiful, exciting, instantly fun, accessible, easy to play, intuitive, and open to competitive play while putting the player in control. It’s not meant to be a game with high system specs, tedium, grind, shallowness, over-simplistic play, complex interfaces, forced grouping with “untrusted players,” or griefing. Zero in on that last bit for a sec.

“The single biggest topic we have seen people debating about our game online is ‘won’t all this freedom lead to griefing?'” Koster says. “Well, griefing is on our No list. But ‘the player is in control’ is a Yes. How do we reconcile those two?”

Settle in for storytime because he digs way back into earliest days of the genre to explain why he’d even bother trying. He essentially argues that the earliest multiplayer games were able to give small playerbases huge open world freedom and a sense of true world persistence, but as playerbases got bigger, trust between players stretched thin and then disintegrated, and developers moved to instance more and more content into instances in order to control the player experience and wall everyone off from potential bad actors. And that’s understandable!

But now, he says, “we know a lot more about trust in games now,” and “prosocial design” is at the forefront of his mind. Plus, as most MMO players instinctively know, “community ties are the biggest predictor of whether a player sticks with your game,” which means that to generate much-needed stickiness, devs need to let players do something other than “just live lives cocooned away from everyone else.” He argues that this “cocooning” has led to MMOs where players can’t trade or even gift items to each other, which ought to be anathema to MMORPG social design (even if it helps studios excessively monetize the game). In other words, he seems to see his job as finding a way to open game worlds back up for social play while also making them safe from antisocial play, without relying on the “instance and no-drop everything” crutch.

“Our commitment is that we will not mandate play with untrusted players, and that we will not invite griefing, and that we will reward social play and trust, and give players more control. […] Too many online games have abdicated the responsibility of solving for prosocial play, and instead settle for just keeping you apart. Well, that’s not what our game is about. And yeah, that means that we have a lot of work to do on making sure that the game offers freedom and security. It means that our game systems have to offer onramps – the ability to play solo when you don’t trust anyone, the ability to gain benefits from playing near each other with no commitment implied, the ability to give and receive gifts when you’re ready to, and the ability to start to trust one another when you feel able to commit. […] We understand how nervous players are about griefing. And we will work hard to prevent that griefing. But fear is why the world doesn’t change around you in these games anymore. Fear is why you cannot rule a fiefdom in these games. Fear is why you cannot build a home in the world, with the layout you choose. Why you can’t trade an item, or dig a hole. If we want what MMOs can be instead of what they are – what we have settled for – we have to stop being afraid and instead embrace the potential. There’s a galaxy full of possibility out there.”

Koster does also quote one of our commenters who essentially argued against any kind of competition in MMOs, including open world housing; he gently suggests that Stars Reach probably won’t be for the type of gamer who doesn’t want interaction with other players as that particular core tenet of the game isn’t going anywhere. He then ends the discussion on the topic of planetary control, another subject that sparked a heated debate in our comments as gamers suggested player control over territory as tantamount to an HOA, arguing that the number of planets in the game world (and the ability for the devs to spin up an infinite number) will mean you simply never have to go to planets whose player-government-imposed rules you don’t like.

“But we do expect that there will be guilds that take pride in running planets that welcome the solo player and don’t ask anything of them, because it will serve that guild’s desire to be rich and powerful. (And yes, we also expect some guilds to build pirate dens to murderhobo on),” he says, likening planet governments to long-running MMORPG sandbox mechanics like Star Wars Galaxies’ player cities – on a much larger scale. “I can’t promise that you will never be impinged upon by another player. It’s a massively multiplayer game. It’s in the name. Stars Reach is about finding ways to get along – but we are not so naïve as to think that it will ‘just happen.’ Building trust is hard work, and we have to build in the game systems that help it along.”