Dan Fortier returns this week with his column, MMOWTF. This time out, in an article titled "The GAME", Dan takes a sarcastic look at designing his own MMORPG.

You can read this article here.

This is just another WOW clone. Bring it on down now.

*giggles*

As long as the BEST groupers are groupers, I would love almost ANY game! 

I dunno what is so hard for designers to grasp, peoples who want to be good at grouping, well duh, breaking news, they are groupers.  Peoples who want to be good at soloing, eh, another breaking news, they are soloers!  Quite simple eh?    When someone who isn't grouping ask to be the best at grouping, this is like a kid asking for illogical stuff, you may grant it to them and see the results as SoE experience first hand with FoH, or you may teach them that peoples who are the best at grouping, well they group.  Not play baseball, raid or vote democrat/republican, but they freaking group.

But seems to be too hard for most designers to get it.  Designers are prolly peoples who fail at learning how to program anyway.  So it can be safely assumed that designers are either lazy (and stop programming), stupid, downright lame or any combinaison of these! 

That is quite simple, really.  Yet, some peoples think that FOREIGN activities deserve better rewards, while in fact they deserve weakers rewards; from a grouping point of view.  I agree that soloers doesn't deserve to be better at grouping then a grouper, however not only soloers, every non-groupers.  Simple...really...BEST GROUPERS have to be GROUPERS, and nothing else but grouping can be asked from someone who just want to become the best at grouping.  Offering alternate paths is cool, enforcing them is wrong (See Saga of Ryzom for referrence about this wrong logic pattern).

PS: I am a GD myself, so I can self-trash all GDs with impunity!  I know first hand! 

Trouble with genres is that scifi is idealized future, and fantasy is idealized past, so there's not much room for else.

Hehe, cool article. ;o

Looks like I will be able to kill mob X for one week...then, if the item that I needed does not drop, I can just use the seemless interface and generate it !

No more frustrations.

Vapor!!!

But seriously, not all cars are designed for the road. Sometimes they take a concept and throw a bunch of cool features onto a 'concept car'. They'll then break these features up and slowly apply them to existing cars in mass production. This editorial could really be onto something. We really just need more skill based games though.

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Originally posted by daetheven
id like to be a gm in this game and fly around in a giant waffle iron with a big picture of scooby doo on it or something that might look like him, oh and can it be a neon orange with neon green dots all over it?

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This was the best laugh I've had yet today. This sounds just like my kids' view on what their life should be like.

I'm not sure if this was designed to be a laugh, or a sarcastic jab at the demands of the player base and just how unappealing such a game would be if it were actually created... Perhaps it is a bit of both? Either way, it did make me think about the idea of frustration and how it contributes to MMOGs. I realized that in some games, when things are just too darned easy, even the most interesting gameplay becomes repetitive, because there is simply no challenge. I am reminded of CoV and how, try as I might, I haven't reached 50 yet, but rather have extreme altitis that will take a character into the high 20s to high 30s, where they will then be parked to make way for a new alt. It is not because the gameplay is boring. I actually enjoy mob fighting very much in CoV, for all archetypes except the Dominator, which is, in my opinion, utterly broken for solo play (only due to their inability to solo elite bosses with purple triangles efficiently), but works quite nicely on teams. There comes a point not very long after you get single origin enhancements at 22+ where things start to become a lot easier. The risks are there, but they are far fewer and are easier to compensate for. In one way, this is great, because you do feel as though you are becoming stronger as you advance, rather than just having a fancier looking rat hunter beating down fancier looking rats that always seem to hurt you just as much as when you were level one. On the other hand, the grind starts to stand out more. Fights aren't as challenging, therefore they are less immersive, and the time to level stretches out as you advance, making each battle much less epic and thus easily dismissed as just another obstacle on the way to the next level.

One thing I would enjoy seeing more of, in CoV and all MMOGs, is something to break up the grind. I think the formula of becoming stronger as you level and having battles be trivial most of the time, with a few epic battles here and there to keep you on your toes is a good formula as you advance, while when you're starting out, you should feel a bit more fragile, but not completely outmatched. CoV does this well. What games really need is more immersive content. CoV has moved in that direction, but there is still a long way to go. Cutscenes are used infrequently at best in standard MMOG gameplay, and is usually reserved for epic battle introductions. I'd love to see more random cutscenes, added for humor, to enrich the story a bit, or just to break up the monotony of killing over and over again. The reason the "gimme" attitude exists is due in large part, I believe, to the desire to finish the game because it is so monotonous. All sense of wonder at what might happen next is removed in MMOGs because they degrade so quickly into a 90+% grindfest with the remaining 10% being not all that amazing (crafting, poorly balanced PvP (or PvP at all, for us carebears), socializing in uninteresting places trying to think of creative ways to make rude gestures with emotes not intended for that purpose, etc.).

So, Dan, I'm sad to say that I don't want to play The GAME, because it's not what I'm after. While I do like some of the ideas, I must admit my skepticism that even your creative mind has produced enough truly entertaining content (and I'm speaking of actual plotlines that I can take part in, not just varied worlds that are all distinctly different). The next great MMOG that comes along is going to address content as something integral to the playing experience, something that draws you in and welcomes you to the world, that gives you a sense of urgency in your quests and a true feeling of sadness should you fail a mission, not just because of a lost prize, but because we actually cared what happened to these computer generated personalities.

Great artical indeed

Afcourse no such game will be made nor will such game ever excist but i fully got the point and thats that alott of gamers (wich i like to prefure to as wanna-be gamers) would like to see such a game because most of them totaly lost their way's in what gaming should stand for and for me that's fun and entertainment, i do care about getting nice gear but does this take over my game play, not in any way, also i do not get upset when other do get the stuff (they deserve cause of the time spend getting it) i salute them and just wished i had either the patients or time to get me set for such long journy's , but i do not have to have a game that elimenates all that just because i dislike it. Maybe some day i will hookup with the right kind of groups/people to get me that stuff( something to maybe look forward too)"THE GAME" shows how lazy wanna-be gamers become, a game that pleases everyone i think is truly impossible to make, sure its possible to generate a very large player base, but forums like this show that too many people have too many different idea's on gaming.