I must admit that I am always wary of third-party IP games. As a rule, licensed games, be they MMO or SP, have not been all that impressive, to me. There are exceptions, of course, but they remain that: Exceptions. Often enough these exceptions will have taken some departure or other from the source material and run like all get out with it, thus giving some freedom to the developers, and letting them spread their wings, so to say.

Looking at a game like SWG (not to be confused with SGW ) I see the problem right away: It's set in the era of the movies, or close to it. This means that the players are 'stuck' in the world that Lucas made, without much ability to really change it. Add to this the tragic mishandling by SOE, and it's small wonder that game turned into a disaster area.

The very best IPs I can think of for a MMOG are game-based. RPGs, miniature wargames, board games or stand-alone computer games seem to deliver some very interesting and flexible worlds, with a lot of flexibility to them. Games like Warhammer or Champions seem to deliver very engaging worlds to play in, with plenty of room for players to carve a niche for themselves - simply because the pen/paper RPG or miniature game was set up that way already. So you get the best of both worlds, here, as seen in WoW: A preexisting fanbase, but also creative and developmental freedom.

The alternating caps problem is easily solved, right along with the "doesn't believe in capitalizing names" one. Computers have been doing string manipulation since forever (read: ENIAC just after WWII). So run the string offered by the user as a prospective name through a string sanitizer - first letter capped, all others lowercased, remove numbers (unless appropriate to setting - or you might replace them with letters*), odd symbols, etc. This stuff is really, really easy to do for a somewhat competent programmer. You could even add in a word filter that kills or replaces offensive words from names. Just make it less brain damaged than the forum word filter of the old WWIIOnline forums - I don't think I can stand being "rear endrear endinated" by having a "sheck" shot into my "chickenpit" again...

You could even run this sanitizer on the fly - similarly to how it's done in City of Heroes. Here, if you exceed specifications (more than one non-letter or number in your name, for example), the symbol just doesn't get written. I doubt many people will feel their freedoms are curtailed by only having one capital letter per word, or not being able to use lots of weird symbols.

*: 1 = L or I, 2 = S or Z, 3 = E, 4 = A, 5 = S, etc. Or just replace them with roman numerals.

There's a distinct difference between "finished" and "finished". One meaning of the word is "completed, nothing left to develop on it" - that's not the one people are talking about here, because that, as was stated, is not what we want from an MMOG. The other meaning, though - finished as in completed to a state where the developers can have professional pride in their work, where flaws and errors have been minimized to an acceptable level... That's not too much to ask for. And there's plenty of studios out there who can pull it off.

The excuse that this is a new medium is just that - an excuse. It's not even a good one. If you as a developer are unable to plan your work sufficiently that you can foresee in major terms how much effort a feature is going to take to implement, then you shouldn't be the one doing that planning. I've worked under a boss who had that character flaw - he was good at selling, but really poor at understanding that when a programmer working for him says "40 hours", that means 40 hours, not 35, not 30. Especially not 25. Working for him was a constant game of catch-up, and overestimates of the time to take - it became typical to add 50% to the needed time, because that would typically be what he'd cut away. This is bad management! And when a game is developed under bad management, you get situations where stuff does not get finished in time or on budget, because the manager was daft enough to underestimate the time required.

In most of the cases of a poorly completed launch title, what I hear from devs is "outside circumstance forced us to..." I call bulls#!t. If the planning had been of a level of ambition concurrent with the available funds and time, you wouldn't end up in that bind. It's the sign of an unprofessional attitude, and that just does not cut ice with me. Game designers need to realize what they're asking for, and if that is beyond their means, they need to scale down their expectations. Better to launch a product that does not have every feature in the book but which is polished and finished (second meaning), than something with a zillion features that are all broken. After all, with an MMOG, you can add the remaining features in updates and expansions, right?

It seems to constantly haunt the games business (and not just MMOs) that parents can't be expected to have a care what their children play. It boggles my mind how anyone would even consider the fourth item Mr. Wood states in his column. By that logic, because children could potentially watch SAW, all the violence and horror should be removed from that film. ESRB ratings were invented for a reason.

On the CoH/V sale: I second Mr. Wood's opinion - this bodes well, I think.

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EQ and EQ2 are on 9-12 month expansion release schedules now?

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And I know Issues aren't called expansions. But that's what they are, in everything but name. New zones come in Issues. Both games were expanded from level 40 to level 50 with the first Issue after launch. New powers show up in Issues.

Patches fix bugs. Expansions expand the game. Call it what you will, that's how I, as a programmer and burgeoning games developer, see it. And if you pay a subscription to a magazine, you're not paying to be sent the same issue every month, but a new one. I don't see why MMOs should be different there. We pay our subscription so that the game is maintained, yes. But then having to pay for an expansion as well... It seems like a bad deal to me.

Now I'm not stingy. I paid the extra cash to get the goodies from the Good vs. Evil edition of COH/V. I preordered COV. I gladly pay my subscription. But I don't find it palatable to be expected to pay extra for every little addition.

I can only say: Play City of Heroes/Villains. We're coming up on the eleventh (yes 11th) free expansion for these games. CoV has been argued by some to be a conventional expansion, sure, but it's a stand alone game in its own right, too. So an expandalone? And that's once in three and a half years.

At any rate, we CoH players don't pay for our expansions (called Issues), they just become freely accessible to us upon release. This also means that while new zones have a period of "oo, shiny!" to them, play returns to the 'old' areas, too. As well, CoH/V players are notorious for their alt-itis. Rare is the player with only one character, and many have entire server allotments maxed out (8 or 12 characters per, depending on if you have one or both games). So there's always a fresh throughput of newbies to play with.

CoH/V has been around for years, and is likely to stay around for years, because it's not static - it evolves. The timeline advances with the Issues, latest in Issue 10 which saw a resurgence of a certain group of enemies and an old zone refurbished to fit them. Issue 11 will give us new missions and task forces to play, as it introduces the long awaited time travel system(!). Issue 9, for its part, introduced crafting in a very sane and balanced manner, while avoiding the tendency to chase 'phat lewt'. Every issue, so far, has had a number of cool new features - power sets for various characters, new zones, new enemies, new storylines, etc. etc. And every one has been free.

I pretty much get my MMO fix playing City of Heroes/Villains. CoX has a... mediocre soundtrack. It got turned off and replaced by a playlist consisting of soundtracks from various superhero movies (The X-Men 1 through 3, Batman Begins, Spider-Man, Superman Returns... There's a whole stack of them). The only beef was that often enough a slow, quiet piece was playing while I and my group were tearing through baddies, or some high-charged action piece would come on while I was hanging at the auction house!

One thought for MMO developers: Sure, put in a soundtrack for the game, but also allow the player to set playlists of their own MP3s (or whatever format might be useful) for different purposes. Maybe three lists: An 'action' playlist for fights and such, a 'suspense' playlist for, for example in a mission or other dangerous area, but not in a fight right now, and a 'quiet' playlist for when you're in a safe area. Maybe even with the ability to add playlists that fit certain activities. Then, as each playlist's conditions are fulfilled, just play them random/repeat through the game's usual sound system, which is more than likely MP3-based, anyway. A reader for a bunch of widely used playlist formats should not be rocket science (speaking as a programmer and software developer myself, here).