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posted by Solinear: Believe me, I''m not faulting only SOE for this (charging as much for expansions as they do for the actual game), I fault all online game developers for doing this.
Correct me if I''m wrong, but the only expansion SOE sold at full price was Ruins of Kunark. That is because that particular expansion included the original game as well as the expansion content.
I think money is irrelevant to this thread. Individuals have been running DIKU MUDs for years, for free. Some of them (Sojourn!) had great content, and huge player bases. Companies charge monthly fees to play and charge for the original game content. I think either model is valid. It is going to be a long while before bandwidth and engineering salaries are cheap enough to produce MMOs for original purchase price only. (or monthly subs only).
Of course in the US we have a market economy driven by demand. The players will pay for it, so why not charge?
My dream RTS game would be MMO, at least in a playability sense if not persistent world sense. Take my favorite game (currently), Warcraft III. I love it. I love playing it multiplayer, I loved the single player. What keeps me coming back to it is the desire to "increase my level". Blizzard keeps stats on all the games you've played, and then ranks everyone based on number of wins/losses per each game type (you also get new/cooler icons for reaching a certain number of wins). Anyway, I think they're going to add some clan and tournament functionality with the expansion, but what would be truly awesome would be to have factions with territories in the "World Space". Rather than draining resources from one place and moving on, supplies could be shipped from other areas, new mines could be dug, and resources would slowly replenish over time. Battles would be continuous and huge. Cities would form, thrive, and be conquered and destroyed.
The MMO aspects would come into it something like this:
When you start out the game, you play directly as a grunt/footmen/whathaveyou, and play the game first person. If you die, you are ressurected when the overlords queue up a new unit of your type, and you go back into the fray. If you play well (kill lots of troops, capture key items, slay the enemy leader), you can upgrade in various ways: either become a more powerful unit type for more direct battle, or you can become a commanding unit (start off as a staff sargeant) with command of a small number of individual troops. The command tree goes up, so that a player could have the potential to be the leader of tens of thousands (or even more?) other players online.
How cool would that be?
[edit: Just realized Crawl had basically the same idea, muh bad]
In a game like that, you could also theoretically have lower level commanders disobey their orders and either a) try to accomplish the goal in a way they felt was better (they''d either get court martialed or not, depending on the success of their tactics) or b) totally ignore their orders and start up their own little army. It''d be like playing one of the Civ games when suddenly a group of Russians gets pissed off and starts their own little civ.
Speaking of which, how about a game where you have a king who commands nobles and armies, and there''s various chains of command. The king tells his nobles to do various things, but the nobles may or may not actually do them - in fact the nobles might be secret supporters of some OTHER king. The challenge for the nobles would be either to gain favor with their king and maybe potentially be adopted into the royal family to become king after the current king dies, or see if they can find another kingdom better suited to their rise in power. The challenge to the kings would be to try and figure out which nobles are telling him the truth and which are just trying to get him killed. (Would be really interesting if he sent an army out to defeat an enemy...BUT his underlings hadn''t told him about the OTHER army hiding in the area... *cackles evilly*)
If a squirrel is chasing you, drop your nuts and run.
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Original quote by Oluseyi ... Say we took MMO sports (soccer, with all the World Cup hoopla of the moment). Established players would have rankings and would be very attractive to the better clubsides while newer players would play in Junior Leagues and develop their skills. All players would have the option of playing pickup games if they prefer, totally ignoring the rankings race and merely playing for fun.
It sounds to me like you just described any one of the hundreds of Counter-Strike/TFC/-insert FPS Mod- leagues and tourneys. Do we not already have this form of MMO game?
