Originally posted by SnarlingWolf 

There was a movie made with a fairly graphic and long rape scene. People actually got up and left the theatre because they just couldn't handle it. The director was asked about it and said something to the effect of "I wanted it to be painful to watch, I wanted people to see how horrific an act this is since when it is talked about in the news it is easy to dismiss since a person who hasn't gone through it would not understand how truly awful the experience is." And the director talked more about it and how she felt many people act like it isn't that terrible of a thing and it was just sex and she wanted to show those people how wrong they were.

I think you are talking about "Irreversible" there.

The largest difference between games and films is audience participation. A film will have the audience sit passively to watch the story, a video game will have the player actively take part. A scene such as the one in "Irreversible" if it appeared in a game would either be a passive cutscene or would require the player to actively involve themselves in order to progress / get the ding gratz. In the latter case, the game actively rewards you for taking part in an abhorrent act. There certainly would be moral concerns about players sexually assaulting virtual characters.

That is part of the problem with MW2: there is no moral choice, just participation (same with most MMOs, actually). Now, the intent could be to show how 'just following orders' leads to some horrible atrocities or the pointlessness of mindless warfare, but forcing players to take part - sure, it's optional but sight unseen you don't know what you are opting out of - to progress is certainly a questionable design decision.

As a general observation, I think people need to be very careful in the use of "It's just a game", because that basically says it is unimportant and shallow. If that's the case, it makes it very easy for an argument to be made that these unimportant and shallow pieces of entertainment need to be better regulated and certainly don't need to be as violent and graphic as they are now. After all, it's just a game - who cares if we cut it down to something more publicly palatable?

Originally posted by HalfEmpty

Btw, are all the authors really as diabolical as their portraits make them look?. Taken together, they look like something out of Batmans' rogue gallery..

Wachter is an experienced community manager, so he knows the importance of making people afraid of you in order to maintain their respect and compliance.

After all, would you annoy the guy in that picture? No, because he looks like he'd show up at 3am knocking at your door, wanting a little 'face time'. ;-)

Originally posted by Khaunshar

At this time, I believe the RMT problem has to be incorporated and solved at basic game design level. Its not something you can viably battle through customer service anymore, it got too big and too professional.

I agree with this. If you are banning gold spammers in-game it is already too late.

Lum didn't mention it, but another way that it is alleged gold farmers get into MMOs is through key generators. Once they crack the key generation system, it isn't difficult to pull out free, full functioning account keys.

Ultimately I think that unless you want to make the MMO economy the central star feature of the game, it needs to be sidelined. Either in-game currency needs to be worthless - CoH/V had no real gold seller involvement until after the auction houses were implemented because pretty much everything was available at a fixed cost and inf was easy to come by, plus no uber-rare loot - or it needs to be sold through official channels (and again, no auction house!). You can't half-do an economy in a MMO - constant inflation of prices is like beautiful music to gold sellers.

"It's a bit confusing why something so big in their first game, namely the supergroup base feature, is nowhere to be seen."

Because CoH/V's supergroup bases were implemented during CoV and are generally seen to have fallen far short of their development potential.

• Bases required you to be part of an SG - not everyone was / is.
• It limited who could actually design the base to the SG leaders (could be changed from this default, but not that many SGs wanted everyone tinkering with the base).
• Because bases were instanced, they were invisible to everyone else. Players wanted to be able to show off their bases.
• It took a long time for base costs to hit the point of being affordable for smaller SGs.
• Apparently a lot of developer time was spent on bases, but player feedback was that bases fell far short of being what they wanted. For ChampO I'm sure a lot of time will need to be spent on building a similar system (hopefully character housing over SG bases, though) which probably isn't the best use of resources at this point in ChampO's life.

ChampO obviously needs a lot more content, but I don't think bases would really be a great thing to implement at this stage.

As indicated by others, the bigger FE gets the more a fast travel system is going to be required. And not just a train line, where you wait 15 minutes for a train followed by a 40 minute train journey to a transfer station followed by another 20 minutes to your destination. Spending an hour in real life on a train isn't fun, so how is doing the same thing in a game enjoyable? Especially when you can craft offline? It's wasted time. That might be okay if you can spend 8 hours a day playing, but the person with 1.5 hours to spend in FE just wasted most of that experience in transit.

Instant travel between hubs is the most likely model, so that players can move quickly between major areas. There might be a role for a public transport system within sectors, linking key points, but movement between sectors is going to be more important. And for only a small cost too, unless FE devs want to see such transport controlled only by hardcore players / guilds.

Players can still explore. They can still socialise around the hub areas. But it cuts out the repetitious and dull travel times. If you have to 'unlock' an area to travel there first, that's fine, but expecting someone to travel repeatedly through sectors over many RL hours is also deluded, especially as more people have to travel through sectors to get where they want to go.

Also: respecs will come too. It's easy enough to screw up your first character (or first few) and "go back and start again" sounds a lot like "press the quit button" to some people.

Originally posted by Khalathwyr

Ok, wait, so the overwhelming majority of people applying that you interviewed were asked to reference WoW, City of Heroes or Guild Wars. Man, I may be right, lol. There aren't many people actually building/programming games who have played EQ, UO and AC anymore. All those guys are doing the hiring these days and not making worlds. That's why I'm not too happy about the overwhelming majority of the latest offerings. These guys more than likely think that because they were asked about those games mentioned above, that's what they should reflect on when making design decisions.

Being able to explain why a poor design decision is a poor design decision in your opinion is a skill that should apply regardless of title. WoW is the most played, most well-known MMO so it serves as a good starting point for the discussion (as Lum indicates, it's common ground). Your opinion might be disagreed with, but it's how you explain yourself that counts.

I actually think that no matter who you went to, saying, "I haven't played any other MMOs apart from EQ, UO and AC" is probably going to raise alarm bells about your knowledge of MMO development, particularly recent progress. Going into a 5 minute rant on UO's design flaws from over 10 years ago is probably going to see your interviewers give a lot of polite smiles as they help you towards the exit door.

Also, according to the forums, everyone played UO and everyone quit due to Trammel.

Originally posted by ArcAngel3

Comments like this make it seem like players are begging for RMT items like respecs.  I don't believe that's true.  I played City of Heroes for nearly 3 years.  I never asked for the ability to buy a respec.  I never heard or saw anyone on the forums ever ask for respecs via RMT, not once.

At launch, CoH had no ability to respec characters. Respecs came out about six months post-launch and not being able to respec your character was a big thing. And then (as now, I believe) each of those respec trials only works once in granting the respec. Over time other methods of getting respecs - the dev-granted freespecs, ultra-expensive rare respec recipes, vet rewards, an RMT respec - were introduced so that respecing in CoH/V isn't much of an issue.

In part, you should be aware that before admonishing Cryptic for having an RMT respec available, Paragon Studios introduced it to CoH/V post-NCsoft take-over. It's $10 vs ChampO's $12.50 and is arguably less flexible than what ChampO offers.

The other part is that providing options for players is a good thing. Thus far Cryptic have been pretty good with offering free respecs to players (and we can see if that continues). But there will always be players who want different options. Some will earn enough in-game currency to spend on full respecs. Others will wait for the freespecs. And then there will be those who are happy to pay directly to get them.

I've always felt that if player attitudes about RMT on forums reflected their attitude in-game, then all gold farmer organisations would be out of business in about a fortnight. That gold farming is a multi-million dollar business indicates to me there are a lot of players out there happy to pay for in-game rewards / currency.

I would have included Seed on that list, given it launched because the devs were running out of money. Plus its launch was also its burial.

Originally posted by Ozmodan

And sorry Stradden, but unless you provide specifics why Champions shardless design is that different from Eve, I have to disagree with your statement.  I don't think it is really pertinent how they implement such a design, it is still basically everyone on the same server.

If you are willing to draw a very broad definition of 'single server' and 'multi-server' titles, then sure, ChampO uses the same system as EVE. But the specifics of implementation are different.

EVE goes for a shardless single world / single zone - everyone plays in the same world at the same time. There are no separate servers to segment the players and every single EVE player could meet in one location if they wanted to (technical issues aside).

ChampO goes for a shardless multi-concurrent zones - players across multiple different versions of the same zone and there are multiple zones that provide content for different level ranges. There are also some instanced locations. Each zone is limited in the maximum numbers of players it can hold before sending players to other instances.

It is different to Guild Wars' "lobby areas leading to shared instances" structure.

Is it the single greatest revolution ever seen in MMOs? No. But it is a logical extension of Cryptic's instancing decisions that existed in CoH/V - now the world is instanced rather than just the warehouse / cave system - and a neat way of dealing with the issue of servers vs single world. The mix of also offering an open naming system to this multi-concurrent zones could certainly be considered innovative. (I'm not sure when Aion in Korea got this feature - the ability to flip to a different version of the same zone where it can be easier to find / avoid players is something Aion has too.)

Of course, one of the ironies here is the discussion of a "server" as if it is just one physical entity somewhere. It could be, or it could actually be a multitude of different physical entities that have a single virtual face as the server. Even single servers might not really be single servers!

Finally, Wachter is unlikely to be a Cryptic plant for this article (which is the subtext I get from several posts here) since he no longer works at Cryptic and hasn't for quite a while.

There was great irony in the section complaining about innovation being overused in trying to look at the picture in detail and being told that it was an "Exclusive Image" in an "Exclusive Feature".

I don't think that is an "exclusive" image at all. ;-)

Originally posted by bombmaster2

 I am sorry but there is a much better list here of the Top 10 MMORPGs and it includes gameplay videos of each of the 10 top mmorpgs as well.

That's a horrible list. It includes Quake Live - not a MMORPG, by any stretch of the imagination - and APB - which isn't even out yet. By that token, that list also needs to include SWOR and Blizzard's next untitled MMO because I'm sure they are going to be popular too.

Originally posted by Dubhlaith

 

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Most of the people that play these games do not even understand what MMOs are, and I think that alone should disqualify them.

On that criteria, a whole lotta people from this thread just got their MMO-of-choice banned. If you only think WAR, AOC or even Aion is a MMO, you really need to educate yourself.

Wizard 101 is a MMO and one of the most fun casual MMOs I've played. It has a ton of innovations that other MMOs should consider including - multiple payment systems, a great free play experience, a flexible and fun combat system - and just because the devs decided to aim their title more towards the childrens' market doesn't make any of their innovations invalid. Does it let a large number of individual players into a single area where they can all see each other and interact, including in combat situations? Yes? Then it's a MMO.

It's like whenever someone mentions Runescape (released before WoW ;-) a lot of players on these forums try to discount it despite it 1) meeting pretty much any valid criteria you could name about what makes a MMO and 2) is hugely financially successful. Or how players try to ignore the FTP MMOs as not being as valid because they don't require a sub fee.

I didn't see this point made, but it should be: what is really interesting is that post-WoW there have been 173 new entries into MMORPG.com's games list (and that might not include those who fail and get scrubbed). That's huge. 173 new titles in 6 years? No wonder the market is crowded.

Originally posted by LynxJSA

Originally posted by Plasuma!!!

The reasons why developers want to get away from PC gaming are two-fold: PCs do not have standardized hardware and piracy is easy. It's the opposite on consoles. It has nothing to do with control schemes or game ideas.

 Can you give an example of an MMO that has been affected by software piracy?

There are illegal private servers out there, where the original game source code is pirated and used to attract players at reduced sub fees and perhaps including mods to the game like increased XP rates or uber items. It is basically pirating the entire game and offering an alternative service, so the pirate can actually make money off the private server.

Then there are keygen applications that will generate a valid game key for your MMO of choice and let you play for a while. Although some gold spammers use fake / stolen credit card details to keep their gold spam accounts going, others use a key gen application that gives them the basic 30 day offer, which is enough on an account they expect to get burned / banned on anyway. 

The reality is that most MMOs don't really mind about the box sale since that isn't their primary revenue generation method past launch day. They don't mind you downloading the full game for a trial run, which is basically installing the full game on your PC, since you need to access their servers and pay an account fee to play the official game. However, there are ways around actually paying to play - private servers (which can be free, or cost less than the official server) or using keygen applications.

On consoles, the different might - and I say might, since it is unproven - be that the console owner has more control over the online platform. MS has banned mod boxes off Xbox Live in the past and could probably do the same if they saw someone using a lot of illegal keys. Also, on somewhere like Xbox Live it could be easier to minimise private server impacts (it would likely be impossible to stop them entirely, but it would be harder for someone to get on them).

It was called Ballerium, not Bellarium. And I'd strongly argue that G&H was even close to being a MMORTS as against a MMORPG with every class having pets available. Having a small number of pets to control doesn't make a game a MMORTS.

As for "why not a MMORTS?", let's look at it this way - name an RTS with an original IP (i.e. no franchises) that has been highly successful recently. It's a pretty short list of names, if you can even think of any (and, to be honest, I'm drawing a blank - maybe Sins of A Solar Empire? Demigod?). The RTS genre isn't attracting the big development dollars anymore. Certainly there are studios who do RTSs, but they have typically built a franchise so have an existing fanbase who will buy it.

So, why not an MMORTS? Because RTS isn't a big selling genre, which makes attracting the investment required for an MMORTS so much harder. And even the titles that have gotten up - Ballerium works as an example here - have fallen over.

I do think that there probably is room for some successful MMORTSs, but it would take a company like Blizzard to bring in enough players to make such a title viable.

Whether the answer was good or bad they were held accountable for the decisions made in their game as the developer of that world. Somehow the problem got worked out for better or worse in the game and most times you continued playing.

This thing about GMs is probably the most correct thing about this article, but I don't think you meant it this way.

If your GM / DM pulled a move you might not be happy with, you could argue with them but they were in complete power to say, "No, your character does this or they die right now." GMs / DMs weren't all beneficent creatures of light looking to make the world a better place through dice rolling; some where jerks who loved to lord their power over the players and others were people who sometimes executed a good idea badly or made mistakes. They might argue what a power or ability could do right before you used it and effectively 'nerf' it in the middle of play.

Your options were to either go on with what the GM / DM wanted or to leave the game. Such as it is with MMOs.

The problem with listening to your players - as others have indicated - is that players are always self-interested and quite frequently wrong. Some have good ideas and can provide an accurate assessment of an issue. The majority can't, or suggest solutions that are not feasible.

The reality of it is when players say, "the devs should listen to the players more" they actually mean "the devs need to listen to me!".

There have been lots of updates and changes since beta, so the play experience has shifted from what might have been initially reported.

Actually I think it is something you like or dislike as a title. It does lack long-term content - although Cryptic is promising to keep the content packs coming out - but offers more flexibility in character creation than pretty much any other MMO title you could name. Combat is pretty fast, but some find it repetitive.

If you've got money to burn, buy a box copy and try it out. Try a couple of different characters and see how it feels to you (it is a very different game to CoH/V in a lot of ways). Alternatively, wait for a free trial if you want to save the cash.

Although I agree an untested launch day patch is a stupid move, to me this is just another case of launch day drama. If you quit a lifetime sub based on what happens on day 1, what exactly did you interpret 'lifetime' to mean?

Cryptic is doing the right thing by offering refunds to those who want them, but I just wonder what people will do a month from now (or longer) if they don't like a patch. Are they going to ask for a refund on their lifetime sub then?

Somehow I think the world will go on without Archlord just fine.

Ahh, I came in late and thought it odd that the Marvel vs. NCsoft / Cryptic Studios wasn't listed. That could have been a big one if Marvel had been successful instead of settling out of court.

EDIT: But then I read it was originally the 'silliest' MMO lawsuits, which even then it wasn't.

Originally posted by Lydon

Honestly people...none of us know what the inner workings of ArenaNet or NCsoft are, so all we have to go by is what they tell us, which is what I intend to do.

This is true - you should trust people based only on what they say.

On that note, you need to give me your financial account information and passwords for your own good. Trust me. Also, get in my van here - it has candy in the back.