3D Vision, your favourite MMO seen thrue the NVIDIA 3D VISION Glasses

I discontinued my old blog "random ideas for mmos" to blog about a couple of tests playing various MMOs with NVIDIAs new 3D-Vision Shutter Glasses.

Author: craynlon

ok you might be scared reading the headline assuming id suggested perma death or something like that...

nah, i really love my char and i dont want to have him permanently erased on some kind of stupid disconect or bad luck.

what i would like to suggest tough for a second generation mmorpg is to let charakters age and eventually grow weaker and die as opposed to me leaving the game bored after 3 years playing the same char.

so : Down with Charakter Immortality, bring in a generational concept

with the grind and level orientated mmorpgs on todays market there are a few problems that could be avoided by letting the charakters age and die:

• old players get bored with the charakter but cant give him up because they have spend sooo much time investing grind into that char
• new players sometimes shy away from a game thats on the market for a few years knowing they would never be able to compete with chars that have a 3year headstart (i.e. in end game pvp)
• companies have to fokus on developing more and more endgame content, uber skills, god quests to keep the endlevel players happy

so why not give a charakter a livespan of lets say 2 realtime-years. he will grow in power for around 16 month till his late 40s then weaken over the next 6 month to die naturaly.
During this time he could spawn a heir to continue his legacy. Maybe this heir can inherit some key characteristics, some special skills and part of his fortune but he should be his own man/woman trying to live up to the legacy of his/ her father.

ok im guilty of using them myselve.

after i played a game or mmo a while im looking for fansites and religiously scrap them for any info i can find on my class, my quests and everything.
to almost every detail and every part of your mmo world you will find a site, a wiki or a forum explaing to you whats to be done with your online time. even for not yet released mmos you find charakter trees and skills sometimes. and the older the mmo gets the more you loose in terms of exploration and experimentation

so for the next generation mmo i suggest:
Burn the Fansites bring in Dynamic Content

• what i do not want is the typical stupid npc that carries a funny ! above his head telling me to talk to him to get a quest
• what i do not want is fansites loaded with databases of items/ quests and skills
• what i do not want is to walk into the local skill trainers office to get a long list of what skills i can aquire for my class

• what i want is a arrow riddled merchant that falls bleeding to my feet while im hunting somewhere telling me with his last breath that his daughter was robbed and kidnapped to an old ruin whos location he reveals on his dying breath.
• what i want is to gather fellow adventurers to go into these ruins to fight the cult of the evil monkey there and rescue the merchants daughter
• what i want is to be contacted by the womens uncle to tell me he once was a great fighter, one of the few that ever mastered the "burning tiger claw strike" and that hes willing to teach me

imagine if in pvp or pve someone from your group invokes the "burning tiger claw strike" for the first time leaving you puzzled how to counter it and marveled at seeing something new

in terms of game mechanics i want something like opening a "Magic the Gathering" booster pack and finding a ultra rare card once in a while bending my brains on how to use it best and evaluating if i should reveal it openly or wait for the last moment in a fight with a pvp arch-nemesis. 
this means i rather have a constant flow of weekly tiny updates with secret content rather then a once a year patchlist with 200 open tweaks of the game. i want rare quests that only happen once in a while, rare skills that only few posess and maybe a system that rather encourages to collect all these rare and odd skills over grinding up in lvl and getting some uberskills just based on your lvl.

seeing how PvP is a very popular part of modern MMO experience I tought we should take a look at the real world and compare it with sports.

Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of PvP and Competition because often enough measuring your skills against a real oponent is far more rewarding then doing scripted quests against hordes of unintelligent  NPC or worse hitting some stupid mob after it spawns running to the next and continuesly doing that for hours. PvP is a challenge and if done right it greatly enriches the feeling of a living, breathing world full of dangers and battles.

What I don't like is some kid that plays 10h/day coming out of nowhere killing me in 2seconds.
Also i dont like some punk that bought his "uber"-gear from adena sellers griefing on others shouting for hours and hours about how he "PWNS every N00B there is"

The real fun starts (at least for clear minded non griefing players) when the game is balanced, the oponent is evenly matched and battle last long and might swing either way.

So if you look at any sport and see how they deal with it you will find that in the real world theres a system of leagues having the casual player fight the casual player and the top athlete fight the top athlete.

so why not build a MMO server structure that represent different leagues ?

• develope a evaluation system based on level, gear and most important pvp win/loss points of the individual player
• at the end of a season (lets say 6month) allow the player a server transfer to a better/lower league
  maybe you even want to force players onto a server suitable to his power level

if team-pvp/ guilds is the fokus of the game allow the whole guild to transfer