I liked Tabula Rasa alot too, but it just seemed like they gave up on it after a while. After a month of play I had tried all it had to offer, I always ended up doing the same things over and over again. The npc invasions of the cities were fun at start, but it seemed very pointless, it could be fun to implement an AI director like the L4D one to add some randomness and maybe some consequenses to your actions.

Though I do miss sitting on a rock outside of a town with my sniper rifle shootthing random mobs. :)

Speaking of throwing out the rulebook, Mortal Online seems to be doing that. :)

I remember Tabula Rasa ran their whole marketing thing about thinking out of the box and starting over with a clean slate. While in reality it was not actually that much different from the cookie cutter MMOs it failed pretty badly...

I'm still waiting till the day they give me cyborg penguins with katanas, flying around in purple space ships trying to conquer the breakfast table through the use of a reverse leveling system based on stealth. :)

Hmm, I would have to go with the ninja, no matter where and when the ninja would survive the fight...

Practically a ninja would lie in a disposable ghillie suit and a long range precision rifle and the pirate wouldn’t even see him before he got a bullet in the head.

Ok, so maybe a few hundred years ago they would set up an ambush with bows and some fireworks, same result; the pirates would be dead before they knew what hit them. (or they could just sink their ship)

Even the coolness factor is won by the ninjas, a life of dedication and excellent killing skills. PLUS they have a huge array of weaponry and tools.

Pirates are run around and rob people so they can, umm, get more money? They can barely shoot and I bet they don’t even know how to clean their weapons properly..

Well, only about 1% of the players read the lore so why bother waste money on it :)

I love getting into the lore of the games I play, WoW had a solid piece of lore when they released the game, and it has gone down hill ever since... and yes they have jumped the shark (I love that term!)

Wouldnt that kind of be against what USA is all about? :) (freedom etc.)

Personally I don't vote (sorry, but politics is a nono for me)

Log in every day and you will have your stars :)

Very nice article Fitzgerald :)

I fully agree with you.

(I wrote a rather long reply but then I pressed something wrong and the text window turned all white)

Ahh, this brings back memories from my childhood...

I do not think that it would be a mmo that I personally  would enjoy for long :)

(I'm more of the sword clashing fireball throwing rifle wielding kind of player)

I agree, you see too many kill and collect quests. Through 90% of World of Warcraft you levelled up by killing things, and doing quests to kill things. This works, but it gets boring quick, after a while you stop reading the background story of why you kill them and just read the “kill 10 magic lanterns of evil” and then go kill them. Though this is an obligatory part of any RPG and has always been, it should not be the only kind of quest available.

A thing that would be great fun would be to have quests to kill a specific player. It should not be a random player though, but someone who PKs a lot and is aware of the risk. Maybe even have small “Wanted: Dead or Alive” signs around. This will probably not happen though, since he would be pretty annoyed that the entire server is hunting him.

 One of the most interesting solutions is to hire a full time writer team and provide a ton of quests each update. Instead of announcing every quest in the release notes then let the players find them for themselves. That way people stop thinking about grinding the quests and starts to live more in to the game and have a positive experience when they find a new and exciting quest. The problem with this is just the cost of having extra staff, but I definitely think that it is worth it. Even a team of two or three writers can whip out a lot of quests. This way you can also have a more realistic quest system so instead of having Baron Von Evilgoose die 1000 times then just have him die once and then the quest is gone. A random name generator for the mob would be another good solution for that one.

 Another thing is events, the thing we all love. There are many kinds of events, both for killers and crafters. An event could be having a town under siege by an army of orcs where the players are called upon to help defend it. Having a huge creature spawn which the entire server then will hunt down, often with huge rewards. For crafters, a quest could be having the server gather x amount of material, then craft something out of them for example gather a huge amount of wood and then have the carpenters crate a fort which would stay in the world forever. Then maybe it could be attacked so the killers would be involved too. This will contribute to the immersion of the game and make the players feel that they make a difference in the game world. The problem with the events I have seen in recent game is the lack of originality; most of them are just like normal quests, just bigger.

 Puzzles, traps and the complex design of dungeons, like the ones you see in Dungeons and Dragons Online are not directly quest related, but they make it a lot more fun to do the quests since you have to think and use teamwork to accomplish your goal. Combining good level design with a good original story is the recipe for creating a good quest.

 Things that I miss a lot and rarely see in mmorpg are quests that can be solved in different ways and by having a high charisma or other stat. For example:

A bandit has kidnapped the daughter of the local fisherman. You are to rescue her. When you find the bandit you can then choose

A: to fight him and take the key to her prison

B: speak to him and convince him to release her (bribing or high charisma)

C: speak to him and snap his neck while doing it. (High Dexterity)

D: steal the key and release her

This way you do not have to be a good fighter to do the quests and they are much more fun in my opinion.

But of cause, you do not HAVE to have quests in mmorpgs to play them. The core of the genre is that they are role-playing games, so it should really be build upon the social aspect and not the questing. But the broader group of mmo players came to kill stuff and get that Uber sword of killing. And they expect there to be quests to spend they time with and get nice rewards for doing them.

Personally I like roleplaying WHILE doing quests :)