Original post by Storyyeller The problem is that the only people who'd want to play are people who know each other well, due to the near certainty of greifers otherwise.
Who would play with a greifer? The GM would simply boot that guy out of his instance or make his instance private.
Currently, there are many table top games being played on the interest among people who don't even know each other. I'm also sure that there would be many GMs out there who would run a drop-in game and just accept players as they come. Sure some players would do stupid things, but as long as the GM could boot him it wouldn't mater.
Have you played the versus mode in L4D? One side plays the survivors vs the other side as the infected. As infected you are kind of playing the role of the director. The normal zombies are mostly just cannon fodder. It's the special infected that are key to success.
Original post by Storyyeller The problem is that the only people who'd want to play are people who know each other well, due to the near certainty of greifers otherwise.
Who would play with a greifer? The GM would simply boot that guy out of his instance or make his instance private.
Currently, there are many table top games being played on the interest among people who don't even know each other. I'm also sure that there would be many GMs out there who would run a drop-in game and just accept players as they come. Sure some players would do stupid things, but as long as the GM could boot him it wouldn't mater.
But what if the greifer was the GM? Heck, even a well meaning but inexperienced player as GM is enough to completely ruin the game.
I trust exceptions about as far as I can throw them.
Then you'd quit that game and find one with a better GM. You could even have a player rating system for GMs. That would mean of course games hosted by the better GMs would fill up first. But then thats only to be expected. Likewise you'd have private invite only games for people who only want to play with their friends.
I think this could definitely work but it would have to be appropriately scaled to the number of interested parties. I don't see a AAA game having this feature for the same reason why so few games have pure support roles when cooperative teamwork is supported-- most players want to be center stage. Few seem to want to be the opfor, working behind the scenes and getting a kick out of shaping the world and throwing enemies at the players.
The thing about the role that's a tough sell is that not only does it require restrained ego you actually have to have some caretaking aspect to your personality to be good at it. Any inexperienced GM can throw hordes and overwhelm players-- but a good DM actually wants to lose. The most disastrous system would be one where you actually pit the players against the GM and make it like a game for them. That would get the GM more focused on winning than the player's enjoyment.
A rating system, as TechnoGoth suggests, would go a long way toward keeping the focus on the players, with GM as shepherd, but maybe also a player referral rating would help, too. This way if someone's funneling people to jerks you'd know.
--------------------Just waiting for the mothership...
As far as pitting the GM against the players goes, that reminds me of the Island Defence map in Warcraft III.
It pits 10 players (builders), against one really strong player (the titan). Even with prevalent banlists, games were often ruined by incompetent or cheating titans. To make it worse, any one of the builders could also ruin the game by suiciding early or feeding the titan.
Of course it was still a popular map despite all these problems.
I trust exceptions about as far as I can throw them.
