Quote:
Original post by The-Per
Currently MMO games seems to be more of a large persistent hub for multiplayer cooperative adventures rather then the Massive multiplayer it boldly proclaims it is.
Without wanting to get too sidetracked, this just requires you to define what you mean by massively multiplayer. Without cooperation or competition, it becomes 'massively singleplayer', but if everybody cooperated, it would be quite difficult to manage, not to mention potentially being boring as everybody is relegated to the same sort of level.
Quote:
If I made an MMO I would try to give at a structure to inspire the players to make the quests for them self. Just as fps games doesn't give you quest like objectives on what to do when you play online I want MMOs to also provide a game systems that gives the player incentive to do what needs to be done without the motivation of a back-story from a poisoned merchant.
Unfortunately, such systems are very hard to get right. Even if you do manage to create a system that generates useful goals, it may be hard to make them interesting without human-written narrative, and it may be doubly hard to ensure the system has a degree of elasticity that prevents the game world from spiralling towards one extreme or the other.
Quote:
Later on you could let dedicated players get the fancy positions within the game that could affect the game on a larger scale. It would be all about managing chaos and make sure each and every situation is balances and provide a fun result.
Oh right, we’re discussing the typical MMO, I’m way off topic. In that case, no I don’t believe it can be implemented efficiently.
We weren't discussing 'the typical MMO'. In fact I know some smaller games that allow players to hold all the political positions and start wars against other city states and so on. The problem is designing a system that provides enough interesting content, is stable in the long term, and is low on developer effort. Giving dedicated players important positions in the game is low on developer effort, but it's not particularly stable, nor is it always particularly interesting for the other players.
