General Discussion

Carolyn Koh's most recent article from the Online Game Developers Conference investigates the idea of player creativity in MMORPGs, pointing to games like: Second Life, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Lord of the Rings Online, and more.

One underlying theme in many of the panels I attended and the meetings I had (admittedly, with Community folk) was the need to engage and serve the player community. Building loyalty is the keyas each game seeks to grab and hold the imagination of the fickle MMOG player of today, distracted as they are by the myriad choices available to them.

"User created content is one way of engaging our community," Troy Hewitt, Director of Community Relations at Flying Lab Software told the audience during his panel. "We use player created and submitted sails and ships in Pirates of the Burning Sea."

Read Carolyn's whole article here.

I realy like the fact that the makers of games are looking at the creative aspects of the players. i always hate games that have a 100 people looking the same.

I do think that Star Wars Galaxies had a good idea to not only let people make stuff but also alowed to color it in the way they saw fit.

Like armor that was pink if you wanted however it was only a hint of what could have been done had then given the users more options for skinning and less on variations in stats it would have been een even beter and more fun experience.

The problem is with games that give people choices,they must  also look at the choice they give.

as a example :

A person in a game is a crafter of armor but what are the choices he/she gets ?

Most games only give him/her choices between diferent stats, cloth = caster, leather = range or hybred class and  mail/plate = warrrior type (most of the time) so all the person can chose when making a armor is what type of armor do i make for what class and what gives this armor the best bonus for that class.

This way it turns in a arms/armor race to get the best stats, how it looks, most don't care(except a few like me ).

If he/she could make the armor look special by changing things like color or even some texture, the armor could be made in a way that everybody could say, hé is that a armor made by "whatshisface".

This way the crafter would not be making generic armor 5 but could be making designer pieces.

He or she could even be called a designer and no longer a armor crafter.

As most MMO's are about alternative lives would it not be a good idea to give the people that do care about the looks of this virtual live the choice on how it looks ?

Id say yes there are some games that have tryed, SWG and now Lords Of The Ring Online are giving the player the option to color there armor (color kits and dye's).

And i like that idea but that option must also be given to a crafter not only the user of the armor and is it realy that hard to add the option to give crafters some more options to change the look of a armor beyond than of male or female(aka full body, bikini).

As i look at char creation of some game i see a lot of choice in clothing but ones you get in there,that choice is almost always gone (with the exception of maybe city of hero/villan).

And this is only looking at armor, same goes for weapons, housing, vehicles, landscape and so much more. 

I know that making MMO's is a lot of work but giving the players the tools to help can remove some of that load.

so i hope that more MMO makers look at the options in the game when it comes to creativity and allow for more choice, as being able to contibute to a game makes me part of it, anything else is me looking in and that gets old fast.

Originally posted by Itanius
What is a "Communy"?

I see entirely too many spelling and grammatical errors in the articles on this website. It's sad...

The developers of Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online found that players enjoyed its music creation system so much in beta testing that it became a feature at launch with devs dedicated to its improvement and function.

more specifically, this system was not part of Lord of the Rings, but Asherons Call 2.. a major flop.  Not sure if the person who did this interview misunderstood and is unfamiliar with both Lord of the Rings Online AND Asherons Call 2, or if this was just not elaborated enough.

I dont mean to critique, but I read this entire article which was basically a plug for some guys interactive website and this sentence caught me for a spin.