quote: Original post by Ironblayde

''Meeting new people'' in an online game, at least from my experiences, generally consists of being found by someone who thinks using all the cheats he can amass is more fun than playing the game, who kills you unfairly with his god-code and says something like "1 0wn j00, b33007Ch!" At least bots play by the rules and speak proper English, heh.

Immediate solution #1: Find these people IRL, and send them to Singapore to be caned fifty times.

Failing that, immediate solution #2: Genie''s (?) Air Warriors Online. The punks that do this are usually 13-20 yo''s who aren''t serious and got online to f*ck with people because it was free. So charge a substantial enough fee, like Air Warrior did, to keep them out. Adults only. Create this as a "Premium" model right alongside your free service if you want.

Solution #3: Save game logs that can be used in complaint reports. Don''t be a wimp about banning. Use moderators. Combine with approach #2, and ban only from the Premium Service.




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Just waiting for the mothership...

Lubb,

Want simple? Even for shooters, you can use the old Battletech (?) wars. You and your clan are fighting a bigger war. Make it multisided. People on the same side __can not__ kill each other, so the only PKing going on is against the "monsters" who are other players.

Oh, yeah, and make newbies valuable somehow. Maybe perm "character" death requires fresh recruits? Or maybe newbies can do things vets can''t? Whatever it is, newbies suck right now to vet players because they''re drawbacks. Change this somehow!

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Just waiting for the mothership...

Lubb, I hear you man....
That''s probably because I''m a bit "older" now, than I was in my original days of "god I love these massive multiplayer games".

Let me give you some background. I''m a long time player of a (pretty)massive online wargame called "Monarchy". It''s simple as dirt, has about 2000 people playing, and there''s a whole bunch of different game forms you can choose, from entirely solo to all-out guild war.
I''m quitting the game at the next reset. Why?
Life is more valuable than spending hours and hours organising wars and talking to guildmates to get the best strategy. Bear in mind, this is a turn-based game, where you get 2 to 8 turns an hour, and it takes all of about 30 minutes to finish all your turns for the day. Yet, the organisation part takes up OODLES of time. It''s not a terribly complex game at the heart, but strategy requires time and organisation.
I found myself spending up to 50% of my working day talking and organising a fictitious bunch of kingdoms to strike another bunch of fictitious kingdoms, woke up, and said "Why the HELL am I wasting my time getting worked up about this, when the best, most realistic ''multiplayer game'' is right outside my window?"

If any of you have seen the thread "MMORPGS - is the Honeymoon over?", and have read the article, you''ll see that I''m not the only one coming to this conclusion. Large online games take up too much of your time, and they are an inherently antisocial thing, even if you spend hours and hours chatting (something I also used to do, and will never do again). People are growing out of it - and moving to a ''community'' system, where you have a large group of people, that can have SHORT, FAST, NONCOMPLEX games together. Things like MPlayer Poker. If you spend 10 minutes there, you can log out again, and nothing "bad" will happen.

So that''s my take on why MMOAnythings don''t really have a future...

People might not remember what you said, or what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel.
~ (V)^|) |<é!t|-| ~

I was an administrator on a UO shard, and I think the two things that disgusted me the most were (1) seeing players spending a goodly portion of their day-lives (and I mean figures like 11-hour timespans) just staying online, talking to whomever, and actually living in the game world and (2) watching powergamers spend all their time treating the game like a single-player game, upping stats through combat and crafting. To me, both are highly pointless (and I admit I was almost one of them at one time).

To have a successful online roleplaying game, you need a couple things:

(1) A means by which to keep mature players interested and punk teens uninterested (this is not personal bias; I have never come to blows with a 25+ year old player about imbalancing the game world''s economy or had to deal with whining about how monsters were too easy).

(2) Some way to keep the world dynamic enough that one could always have something new to do. This means many, variable-goal, world-state-augmenting quests that don''t always revolve around killing some monster and bringing parts of its carcass to someone on the other side of the world.

(3) A way to actually evolve the game-world. What about scientific breakthroughs that make the world easier? A game cannot stay in a static time period and expect to live very long, because the same-old same-old becomes monotonous.

(4) Ways for the players to be outstanding members of computer-run societies, but not necessarily said societies'' lifeblood. Sure, it''s great to see player-run towns with player-elected mayors and whatnot, but in many areas where this is not possible, I think it''s necessary to revert to the NPC-run. Very difficult to accomplish effectively, but would it not be a good thing if someone could work for the NPC mayor taking care of ambassadors from other lands or running scouting trips into the nearby wilderness?

(5) Time-based, rather than frequency-based skill advancement. Sure, you might think levelling a paladin to level 20 in 3 days was cool, but it really does not make sense to cater to those players who have too damn much spare time on their hands.

The list goes on, but I think you get the point; game worlds need more attraction than hack / slash / advance.

Maybe these will change in the near future (and I am working on this with my game), but players really need to point out to game development companies that there is more to all this than flashy graphics and endless battle.


MatrixCubed

Yes, I was shocked when Richard Garriott (sic?) started talking about people spending 8-hours a day on it, I mean unless a person was seriously disabled, this is a terrible thing to be doing on a constant basis. Even if they were disabled, there are probably many better / cooler things they could be doing.

I mean in Ultima 8 there was a guy who talked about how he felt he had wasted a day if he hadn''t done anything productive in it.

I mean there is the health side, both physical and mental (isolation, lack of exercise, etc) to be considered, the effect that this could have on peoples relationships and families. "No I won''t take you to school hon'' I''m building a cathedral with the Mason''s guild."

You can''t really say that "why play MMORPG''s when you can live a real life?", because RPG is role playing game where you play a role that you don''t play in real life . If your real life is too boring you might want to play a few weeks as a fearless warrior or as a cyborg in the future.

I personally like much more the "simpler" multiplayer games like Quake and Subspace that do not take much of my time if I don''t want to. But I can also very well see why people play MMORPG''s that take 10 hours per day to play. They very likely don''t do it because they _have_ to do it, they do it because they _like_ it (more than their real life).

As the technology gets better the MMO games will become even more popular than they are now, because then you can do most of the real-world things also in the MMO world. You can live 4 parallel lives and not just one. And then pick up the one that is most promising . Sad but so true.

People even get married online these days so please be a bit more open about the social side of MMO games.

Ok, i''ve always seen this trend around discussions of these games, but i want to put a stop to it right here.

I am both a punk and a teenager, and that does NOT mean that i am a bad influence on the game world. I do not appriciate the prejudices expressed here to "keep out the teenagers" and keep these games "adults only." "25+." How would it sound if we were talking about "whites only," or "keep out those troublesome colored people?" How about "I''ve never met a woman who was abusing other players, so we should keep out the men?" What you have to realize is that young people have exactly the same control over their situation as all the above mentioned groups, and it is UNACCEPTABLE to lump them all together because there is a higher rate of "bad" behaviour from their statistical group.

That having been said, i will attest that from the huge amount of time i spent playing one MMORPG, yes, these players who got their entertainment from annoying and harassing other players were more often than not in this age group, although CERTAINLY not exclusively, but that does not give anyone the right to make a value judgement on the age group as a whole. Again, just because in the US, more crimes (at least ones that are caught) are comitted by african-americans does not give ANYONE the right to make a value judgement on everyone of african decent!

So, instead of restricting the age of the players, and in fact, blaming the players for the game''s deficencies, realize that this culture arises from games where cooperative play is rewarded less than (or even equally as much as) playing alone. The game should always encorage people to not only work together, but to work within the mindset of the game world. PK is ok, if it makes sense within the game world, and if a MMORPG just implemented this idea, these people who get their kicks from abusing other players would have an outlet for their agression that would FORWARD gameplay, rather than ruin the game for people.

-benc

- I don''t care what you all think; I wanna ban three-handed guys from playing online because the times I tried I always got mah butt whippt. - Lubb

Well you seem to like Doom (Doom2 is my favortite game from ID to date), wasn''t playing deathmatch or coop Doom a lot more fun than just playing against the computer?

Wouldn''t Doom teams be funner yet? Or how about armies?

The ''soceity'' of mmorpgs does need some work...

In a few years time, spending more than 50% of your awake-time socialising on the net will be classified as a psychological syndrome.
Hiding away on the ''net is not a good way to spend your life, and no matter how popular it gets, it will still be an incredible waste of human life. Making it popular doesn''t make it right.
I''m personally sickened by people who have boyfriends/girlfriends online, who get married online, who spend their life honing their jumping skill in Ultima Online... They can say "but this is more fun than real life!", but that just means they don''t know how to live.
Learn to make your real life fun, instead of hiding away somewhere where nobody knows your real name or face.


People might not remember what you said, or what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel.
~ (V)^|) |<é!t|-| ~