1 million of you are keeping Blizzard in money hats.

[Nevermore]

I would like to see some more 'visual' loot. If you kill a goblin who was wearing a leather skirt and had a spear, you'd be able to loot a leather skirt and a spear. If you killed some plate wearing brigand, you got his plate, along with what was in his backpack or fanny pouch or whatever. If you kill Archmage Doan, and he's got the hypnotic dagger equipped, you get to loot that. If he's using the staff and wearing the cape, he doesn't drop the dagger. Let crafters be able to use the leather from the skirt to to make stuff. Let the plate be able to be melted down and used towards something else.

I like this. It always bugs me that everything but item #65456345 from Loot table Delta disappears from a dead mob. Being able to break it down into crafting components (ala Guild Wars) is a good way to do it.

Guild Wars does have a pretty nice crafting system.  I especially like how you can break a weapon to get a component to put directly onto another weapon, instead of having to craft something completely new out of it.

[HaemishM]

Perhaps it might be better to ask "How can we avoid getting canned this time."

Haha, I guess that was a "burn". I'd love to answer that question but I'd probably get in a lot of trouble if I did. :)

I'm guessing that the answer to Ironwood's question is probably "Don't work on an MMOG for EA."

Also, WindupAtheist, who are you and what have you done with our myopic turd burglar?

[Mesozoic]

Schild has ranted about "hotkeys" before, I didn't get it then and I don't now.  Please explain.

[HaemishM]

I think schild is saying that if he wants to garrotte someone, instead of pushing the 4 key for garrotte, he wants to actually perform some actions that feel more like he's performing actions instead of hitting one button. He wants to feel like an actor, not a pellet-puncher.

For example, take the Splinter Cell games. In those games, you can pick certain locks, but it's a mini-game of sorts. It's not a horribly complicated mini-game, but it gives tactile feedback (through the force feedback controller) and it isn't just "Hit my lockpick key and sit back." When you want to interrogate someone, you have to sneak up behind them, and at just the right moment hit your attack button to place your gun against their skull, put your arm around their neck and get the option to interrogate them (or shoot them). It's combination of buttons that make the player feel like he's doing something, like a participant, instead of making him feel like a barely active viewer. Hotkeys are very passive forms of gameplay.

[Ironwood]

I think Schild is saying he wants Street Fighter/ Mortal Kombat/ Ninja Gaidain gameplay in his MMOs.  Instead of "Push button for riposote" you'd  ^ > < b+a on a gamepad.  Basic attacks on 'teh buttons'  & specials from button combos.

I'm old (ok not really) but without a real joystick those combos have always sucked, IMO. I'll stick with buttons, thx. 

I hope that's not what he's saying, because it's fucking retarded.

Imagine your 3 hour MC raid with that kind of shit.  Instead of pressing 7, you have a combo for backstab.  Your hands would BREAK after the first hour.

Ive played slash-em up/platformers for 3 hours, God of War, Devil May Cry and even the old Rune game for the PC come to mind. Ive also played Soul Cali 2 and Street Fighter for hours too.

I want a mmo fighting game, or a mmo fps, mmo platformer or mmo er.... "GTA". The mmorpg genre is dead to me.

Um, no.  I regularly, when PvPing, have to press 1,2, 5, 6, combo points, 4, 7 vanish.

Now imagine that everyone of those numbers was a combo ITSELF.  Multiply it by seven.  Add it every ten seconds for 3 hours.

FUCK THAT.

[HaemishM]

Combat would have to be slowed down GREATLY in order to make that kind of gameplay feasible. You couldn't just drop that into WoW and have it work.

[WindupAtheist]

I'm having a good day, I suppose.

Speaking of EA, I'd really like to see the developer known as Leurocian hired onto a project with promise.  Between "paragon" boss monsters, their shiny (but not TOO uber) loot, and the massive AI upgrade he apparently masterminded just before leaving UO, he's shown an ability to graft fun, well-conceived systems onto even an old and senile game.  I'd like to see what he could do on a game with money and a future.

Oh, and some more rambling concerning "smart" bosses:  It's not really a monster-smarts versus player-smarts.  The players are always going to be smarter than anything you can code into an MMORPG.  It's a matter of encounter complexity versus group coordination.  If the evil wizard lord can teleport, and turn invisible, and summon demons to help him, and if those demons are operating on AI at least marginally more complex than just trying to tank the nearest player, then you have an encounter complicated enough to challenge eight people scattered around the country who are trying to type and fight at the same time.

Yes, a praticed and well-coordinated group is going to be able to go in there and own him.  That's fine.  They have a right to win if they have their shit together, I suppose, and trying to stop them is just going to make things unplayable for everyone else.  At least in this case you have the game dominated by well-oiled groups who can work together, and not catass zerg guilds.

[penfold]

Um, no.  I regularly, when PvPing, have to press 1,2, 5, 6, combo points, 4, 7 vanish.

Now imagine that everyone of those numbers was a combo ITSELF.  Multiply it by seven.  Add it every ten seconds for 3 hours.

FUCK THAT.

My point was I wanted to see a decent mmog that wasnt an rpg, not a wish for stupid control methods used in the next generation of eq clones.

You can still have a massive persistant world in which combat and gameplay doesnt revolve around rolls of the dice and other methods ripped from PnP games of the 80s.

[schild]

I hope that's not what he's saying, because it's fucking retarded.

Imagine your 3 hour MC raid with that kind of shit.  Instead of pressing 7, you have a combo for backstab.  Your hands would BREAK after the first hour.

You wanna know how to beat Blizzard? Make Warcraft crossplatform for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 and have it have Zelda like gameplay. Then tell me it's retarded. The Worst Worst Worst console games sell more than most PC Games these days.

By the way, hitting "1" and watching the character attack isn't fun. There's only one thing on a computer that should make my character attack - the mouse buttons.

What I was saying is that the core system underlying most MMOGs is so fundamentally not fun that they'd have to rewrite that before it would even be worthwhile to go pie in the sky. Thing is, most developers are probably "content" with those systems.

[schild]

And now having read this page - Ironwood - fuck 3 hour raids. Fuck them, right in their ass. They shouldn't exist. Stop using that as a counterpoint. They are the extreme of catassing dickheads winning zee games through having no life.

Tetris is more involved and has a more appropriate control scheme than MMOGs.

[Pococurante]

I am so not going to play any computer game that has me gyrating calisthenics.  That's what hoop and tennis are for... maybe a biofeedback game like Wild Divine.

'm not so sure jaded consolers are any better a focus group than hardcore devs who want both "to develop the game they would play" and have it sell more than than robot jesus.

[Hoax]

Schild tell me more of these Japanses only MMO's (pm if you must) and how I can play them.  I liked front mission for what it was worth and I love robots..

Also hotkey combat is shit.  Even a barely fps system ala Hellgate sounds lightyears ahead, the points about Zelda were brilliant and how much drool was there about Mount&Blade?  There are much better ways to design combat then giving everyone a hotbar and having them drag their stupid skills onto it.  DAOC tried to make a decent system with their positionals and skillchains but lets move on already.

You guys are having decent ideas about pvp, all I ever asked for in WoW was instead of stupid "fake" instanced battlegrounds all those so-called contested zones were actually contested.  If HB or SS was razed to the ground every day instead of a game of pointless tug-of-war being played there.  Or perhaps if Graveyards could be captured, or just adding all the types of things they have in battlegrounds to the actual gameworld I would have kept playing.

[schild]

Schild tell me more of these Japanses only MMO's (pm if you must) and how I can play them.  I liked front mission for what it was worth and I love robots..

Let me dig a bit, I'll do some research and make a thread about games only available in the land of the rising sun. But let me say - I have much hate for Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine not coming out in America.

Edit: Actually, it's worthy of an article whatwith us going into post-mortem on this generation of games. Give me a couple days.

[Ironwood]

And now having read this page - Ironwood - fuck 3 hour raids. Fuck them, right in their ass. They shouldn't exist. Stop using that as a counterpoint. They are the extreme of catassing dickheads winning zee games through having no life.

Tetris is more involved and has a more appropriate control scheme than MMOGs.

Er, you're obviously not following my other posts....

Edited to Add :  And I think you're wrong Period.  You're coming at this from a console perspective which I don't think is valid anyways...

[Ironwood]

By the way, hitting "1" and watching the character attack isn't fun.

And, I contest, if you're doing that, I don't know what fucking game you're playing, but it isn't WoW.

[Nija]

Put it to you this way Ironwood. In the Perfect Game(TM) people shouldn't be able to write script bots that do the same series of attacks over and over on every monster type and come out alive 98% of the time.

Having setup a wow rogue bot or 4, you see the downfalls of the system pretty quickly.

[schild]

That's fine. I'm sorry 90+% of the gamers in the world don't give a flying rats ass about computers and at this rate I'll be among them within a year or two. My computer at the moment serves as a console for real time strategy games and first person shooters. In fact I have a seperate PS2 hooked up to the monitor that I can switch over to when I actually want to play GAMES. Your future of spreadsheet wars is bleak, and I'm sorry your hands get tired after playing a console game for 3 hours. But the problem doesn't lie with me. People want to know how to beat Blizzard. Beat them where they don't exist. Consoles. No one has been able to beat Blizzard in the past on the PC and it isn't going to start with SOE, NCSoft, Webzen, Turbine, Funcom, Mythic or whoever. It just won't fucking happen. Their vision of the future is plagued with tunnelvision. At this point the only ones who stand a chance out of that group are Webzen with games like Huxley on the 360 and even then they Must Get Microsoft to release a Keyboard/Mouse for it since it's an FPS. But what do I know, Halo 2 sold hojillion copies.

Edit since you responded twice: Stop being a douche. I can only assume you suck ass at console games from what you've said because describing MMOG combat as "hitting 1 and waiting to attack" is what is known as exaggeration. Unfortunately it's not very exaggerated.

[penfold]

Align yourself behind dragon and press 1,2,2,2,4,1,3,2,1,4,2,8,2,1,1 (rpt for 20 minutes)

vs

Run up behind dragon, leap on to its rear leg, jump off a spur and climb up its back, run up the spine, position yourself on its head, ride it as it bucks about, charge up your sword with the appropiate button, activate the right skill, bring the sword down into its skull, leap off the dying dragon as it falls, and greet your group, the crossbow man whose been sending bolts into its mouth, some magic guy doing something creative *,   the sword guy slashing at the tendons on its legs and some pointy eared chick whose been firing off heals and positioning shields and wards on the others.

*If you want a decent application of magic in a non rpg game think about HL2s physics mod and whats its capable of.  Lassoes, cages, shields, manipulation of surroundings, telekinesis to stop damage to your group etc and not a fireball in sight.

[Llava]

Penfold just covered something I was going to address regarding "epic bosses".  Fight a dragon in DAoC and basically you walk up to it until you're close enough to attack, then you just keep on attacking.  There's no strategy to that- it's /stick and autoattack, throw in a style when you can.

The problem is that the dragon is basically intangible.  You can walk right through it.  Therefore, there's no strategic positioning.  You don't have to do it with every damn monster, but in the case of giant huge stuff like that LET players use movement to their advantage.  Let a player run up a dragon's back and attack its eyes- make the eyes separate targets that, when taken out, cause the dragon to miss more frequently and lose access to some powerful attacks.  Make the neck a separate target that, when damaged enough, removes fiery breath.  That kind of thing.  Think outside the box, don't jsut make it "/stick, autoattack".  That's not fun.  It's not epic.  It's not interesting.  It's killing a rat outside the newbie town, but this time the rat is bigger, does more damage and has a lot of hit points.  And you need 40 people to have a chance.

As for Schild's point-
Something to consider, look at Vampire: Bloodlines.  Using a weapon, click to attack once and you'll swing the weapon in one direction.  Click to attack again and you'll swing it back in the other direction.  A third time and you'll generally perform some sort of uppercut attack that knocks the enemy away.  That's all with one button- standard attack.  Why do all attacks in MMOGs have to be completely separate from other attacks?  CoH is particularly guilty of this (though maybe that proves that this isn't so important, since COH combat is so lauded).  My martial artist can perform a Thunder Kick, followed by a Crane Kick, followed by a Storm Kick.  Or he can do Storm Kick, Crane Kick, Thunder Kick.  Or Crane, Thunder, Storm,  Etc etc.  But the order doesn't matter or do anything.  The animations aren't different at all.  Even something as simple as "Well Storm Kick leaves you in a stance ideal for performing a Thunder Kick, so Thunder Kick animates faster than normally if you use that to follow up Storm Kick, but because Storm Kick hits an enemy in the head they're not ready for or expecting a sudden powerful blow to their torso so their guard is down and a Crane Kick following a Storm Kick would do a bit more damage"  would make things a lot more interesting.  Throw in some combos- logical ones.

CoH is starting to do this a bit with combined elements.  The new Trick Arrow set includes an "Oil Slick" power which drops oil on the ground slowing enemies and making them fall down.  Players can hit the oil slick with a fire attack to light it up and burn enemies within it.  In a recent "Ask a dev" session, one of the designers was saying he hopes they can do more stuff like that- like fire attacks would evaporate ice causing a mist with its own effects, or if they add water powers then electricity hitting that would electrocute all enemies in its range, etc etc.

To paraphrase John Donne, "No attack is an island."  Let them interact with one another in logical, fun, and unique ways.  This goes deeper than "this attack debuffs defense so it's good to use first" because that affects all other attacks in the same way.  It creates a "always open up with this attack" situation rather than a strategic situation.  Maybe one combination of attacks does more damage so a player usually does that but another combination has a better chance to land and can debuff defense so the player would use it against an enemy who's hard to hit.  Maybe an enemy has resistance to damage so that any given attack can do no more than 5% of his max health in damage so it's in the players' interest to use the chains that allow attacks to cycle the fastest rather than looking for the biggest hits.  Maybe another enemy subtracts 40 damage from every attack he takes so players want to use combinations to create the biggest hits they can rather than cycling low damage fast attacks.

And, like WUA said, go outside just combat mechanics.  Maybe an enemy teleports.  Maybe someone can counter that.  Maybe the enemy flies around so you want someone with the ability to bring them down.

[El Gallo]

I want to see more lists. ElGallo, what's your list like?

Getting killed at work, but here you go (I'm sure I left a lot out, but I am long-winded enough). 

Start with WoW and give me...

1.  More.  More is the main thing I want.  I want more content.  More great single group dungeons, more great raid targets, more great solo quests, and I want them added more frequently.  I want more interesting/funny NPCs wandering around.  I want more cool-looking nooks and crannies.  I’d pay a lot more if you gave me a lot more stuff. 

2.  An even better handcrafted vs cut-and-paste ratio.  WoW is pretty good here, but there is room for plenty of improvement.  I know that we’ll never have every table and chair handcrafted by an artist, but the cut-and-paste caves and buildings grate on me.  Also more expensive.

3  Equally campy but less cartooney graphics (this is purely aesthetic and I am probably not expressing myself well, but I prefer the aesthetic ideals of the original EQ [which I call “campy-realism” which is a term I made up, perhaps there’s a real word for it?] to WoW [“campy cratooney”] or EQ2 [“welcome to the uncanny valley”].

4.  More consistent scale to content.  WoW has 5 person zones, 10 person zones, 15 person zones, 20 person zones, and 40 person zones.  This is hard on guilds.  If you build your roster to have 40 online and you do the 20-man, people are left out (and because you need certain roles, you can’t always just do 2 groups).  Same with 20 vs 15, etc.  I’d like just 2 sizes.  Group and raid.  For groups I think anything from 4-8 would work.  For raids, WoW’s 40 feels about right.  Maybe 30.  Enough that it takes some real skill to get everyone flowing and reacting as one person, but not the mammoth 72-man EQ1 raid where most people felt unimportant.  Also enough so you can have a nice-sized guild with some sub-groups without having to leave too many people on the sidelines when raids hit. 

5.  Robust serverwide and cross-server communication.  Like EQ1 has/had.

6. Voice-to-text.  I like the somewhat more twitchy and definitely more demanding nature of WoW’s high end game vs EQ.  But this demands quick communication while your fingers are occupied, which means typing doesn’t work so well.  You also lose the ability to shoot the breeze, which is really one of the main reasons to play.  I find voice communication to be immersion-breaking and cuts me off from the real world too much (with headphones on, I can’t talk to my wife or listen to the radio while playing).  Voice comm also sucks in large groups, because everyone cannot talk at once.  Voice-to-chat seems to me the ideal solution.

7.  More incentive to socialize throughout your character’s career.  For much of the game, WoW’s mechanics actively punish you for grouping.  Naturally, people don’t group that much through those patches.  Soloing should be viable, but grouping should almost always provide faster advancement (even including set-up time).  Socialization is what makes these games tick, and WoW could use more of it. 

8.  Harder, more demanding raids.  WoW’s raids are pretty demanding, and we’ve come miles and miles from Vox, Trakanon and Vulak.  The new 20-man dungeon is flat-out awesome.  Keep things going in this direction: more complex scripts requiring more things from every single person there.  More chaos from the enemy that requires more coordination from us to beat. 

9.  Related to 8.  Kill the UI mods that trivialize content.  Some of the mods in WoW are just out of hand.  Decursive, the CQ-style addons for almost every raid boss, etc are no fun for the players and they force the developers into an arms race where they design the next round of content assuming the players have those tools.  This is a hard line to draw, but it needs to be drawn.

10.  Skill customizability through gear (preferably) or quest/AA-type advancement, not talents/specializations/etc.  Balancing de facto subclasses is impossible, being permanently or semi-permanently stuck in one de facto subclass sucks, collecting gear that lets me effectively be one of a number of de facto subclasses depending on the situation doesn’t suck.

11. Appearance customization through fluff clothing and the like (I like almost all WUA’s ideas now that he has explained them, especially this one).  Some but all of which is tied to PvE or PvP achievement.

12.  Housing.  Non-instanced.  Primarily in cities though some could be spread out and a game-mechanic reason to go there.  Ways to decorate them, some but not all of which are tied to PvE or PvP achievement.

13.  PvP, I could take it or leave it.  But if you have it in your game, you need to prevent PvE advancement from determining PvP results (i.e. make PvP much less gear dependent than PvE).  You can already see this problem having two bad effects in WoW: on one hand, PvE gear does somewhat imbalance PvP, on the other hand the fear of making this problem worse is crippling the game’s PvE progression).

14. Itemization.  Caster itemization needs to work like melee itemization from the beginning.  WoW screwed the pooch badly on this.

15. The ability to raid in smaller chunks.  This goes for single-group dungeons too.  All the dungeons should have wings a la Scarlet Monestary/Dire Maul.  Trash mobs should not respawn in raid instances at all.

[WindupAtheist]

Oh, and on a side note:  I want in-game events, the outcome of which can be affected by the players.  The game should be built from the ground up to accomodate something along the lines of the Scenario System that Calandryll and friends had running in UO for a while there.  Damn those were cool.

Yes, this is going to take extra money and effort.  You're either a penny-pinching niche game, or you're breaking open the piggybank to try and go head-to-head with WoW.  Choose.  I'm not of the opinion that WoW is invincible, but you're sure as hell not going to beat it (or even compete with it) on the cheap.

[schild]

Once again, challenging WoW is not a possibility. You can not challenge Blizzard. It's not in the cards. I don't care how much money you have. You simply have to walk around them. Fight them on a front from which they can't fight back.

[Hoax]

I disagree, if I can slot my shotgun with chain lightning shells and an underslung grenade launcher in Hellgate:London I will never touch a Diablo game again... 

Oh and akimbo pistols too please.  Can WoW be beat?  I dont really know, I dont think any of these want lists that start with "Take WoW" are worth a damn though, because if I wanted WoW I'd just play WoW.  How about give me Conan with all the things they are talking about actually implemented and working well.  Not that that will ever happen but damn if it wouldn't be sweet.

[Bunk]

Just to pipe in on the subject of housing - take a look at what AC1 did. Houses placed in designed towns - we should never again see the urban sprawl of UO. Also, the idea of multi person houses works, especially mansion/castle type.

Even WoW could probably currently implement some level of guild Castles without having to resort to instance housing, which in my oppinion is totally immersion breaking and negates the point of housing.

When I played AC Darktide I hunted by myself and I socialized in my guild town/mansion. The game gave you reasons to socialize outside of hunting, because the free for all PVP mandated that friends and guildies congregated together when not out grinding for the sake of common protection.

[WindupAtheist]

Once again, challenging WoW is not a possibility. You can not challenge Blizzard. It's not in the cards. I don't care how much money you have. You simply have to walk around them. Fight them on a front from which they can't fight back.

Maybe, maybe not.  But we're definitely going to find out, sooner or later.  Once WoW's total income starts being measured in BILLIONS with a B, all sorts of businesspeople who never knew WTF an MMORPG was before are going to take notice, and we're going to see some seriously weird shit.

[Cheddar]

Oh, and on a side note:  I want in-game events, the outcome of which can be affected by the players.  The game should be built from the ground up to accomodate something along the lines of the Scenario System that Calandryll and friends had running in UO for a while there.  Damn those were cool.

Yes, this is going to take extra money and effort.  You're either a penny-pinching niche game, or you're breaking open the piggybank to try and go head-to-head with WoW.  Choose.  I'm not of the opinion that WoW is invincible, but you're sure as hell not going to beat it (or even compete with it) on the cheap.

I agree whole heartily.  Asherons Call should be remembered for what they did the first 2 years (ignore everything after the AC2 announcement).  The monthly events were totally gnarly, and the story archs all culminated into a single EPIC event.  Allow me to define EPIC.  Epic is managing to be in the .0001% who got into that group of 60 to take down a "raid" dragon.  EPIC is the fact that I could hop on, and group or not assist in something, well, bigger than my static path.

This requires hiring individuals though to manage such affairs.  UO did attempt to do this in various ways, and for the 4 to 5 people who got to partake in it I am sure it was satisfying.  I believe their mistakes as a whole could (should) be taken and used as a guide to all future games that are being built.  A short list off the top of my head (good and bad):

1. Open play is king, but repurcussions must be addressed.
2. Crafting should not be the end all, but a person should be able to function at the highest levels WITH crafted material.
3. Levels automatically define where a player stands.  This is good for some, but the majority will never get to the end game.  If you use levels, do not make it the center of your game.
4. EVERY central class should have some sort of "end game" viability.  It is ok to have some classes rock at PvP but suck at PvE.  But any core class that sucks at both will hinder end game enjoyment.
5. It is ok not to be combat centric.  No really, it is.
6. $$$ invested = Subscription #'s.  $$$ invest + philosphy majors = Japanese subscriptions.  Quiet the conundrum.

Going against the Goliath is death, I agree.  But who made the Goliath? 

Edit. Couple more additions.

7. If you have real estate ensure there is enough room for growth.  UO, for example, did not have this.  Do you really think Trammel was about PvP?  I guarantee if you went a bit deeper it was about people having no room to build.  I am surprised this does not come up more in discussions actually.
8. If you decide to make crazy drastic changes then fix the bugs ASAP.  Again the Trammel for example; people could summon blade spirits and EV's (2 powerful spell summoned creatures that the summoner could not control) all willy nilly; as long as they were in a guild.  It was insane seeing this, but it worked so everyone copied.  Far as I know it was never fixed and now everyone has millions.
9. Money drains.  Yes this is not real life, and we are operating on a flat economy, but this needs tempered with real perspective.  It should not be treated as if it was a controlled economy, money dumps should be strategically implemented, and in a logical manner.  Example: Everyday thread - Newbie price.  Hot pink neon super glowing thread?  Higher value.  Sounds simple but it really is hit and miss in these days (you will never evolve faster than the players). 

[WindupAtheist]

3. Levels automatically define where a player stands.  This is good for some, but the majority will never get to the end game.  If you use levels, do not make it the center of your game.

Okay, question for anyone reading:  Are we ever going to see another successful mass-market MMORPG that doesn't use a leveling system?  Other than maybe the next time Raph makes a game?  Or do people like their ding too damned much?

Because as much as I'd love to see a modern update of the UO skill system, I can't help but feel like a little bit of a deluded elitist, demanding that developers ignore the market and make the game I want to play.  Sure, I think levels suck, but they seem to hit some sort of crack-monkey compulsive gambler button in peoples brains.

[Velorath]

3. Levels automatically define where a player stands.  This is good for some, but the majority will never get to the end game.  If you use levels, do not make it the center of your game.

Okay, question for anyone reading:  Are we ever going to see another successful mass-market MMORPG that doesn't use a leveling system?  Other than maybe the next time Raph makes a game?  Or do people like their ding too damned much?

Because as much as I'd love to see a modern update of the UO skill system, I can't help but feel like a little bit of a deluded elitist, demanding that developers ignore the market and make the game I want to play.  Sure, I think levels suck, but they seem to hit some sort of crack-monkey compulsive gambler button in peoples brains.

Is there some huge difference between grinding up skills and grinding levels that makes one inherently more fun than the other?  They're both just character advancment systems that serve just about the same purpose.  You either put the time in to raise up a skill or you put the time in to raise up a level.  It's still just numbers going higher as you put more time in.

[Raph]

A brief thought on the housing thing.

I dislike virtual apartments because they lack visibility (which means you can't show off) and visitability (which means you can't have public spaces that are privately owned); I dislike pre-placed plots because they lack choice in location of where to live (you can't join a city that is full up; you can't choose a view that you like; you can't have an obscure cabin in the wilderness).

I dislike urban sprawl, though. It's sort of ironic that in SWG we calculated the amount of available space versus the amount of placeable houses, and ended up with 95% open land, and it's still considered to be urban sprawl. I suspect the issue is consistency of the openness; when you're "out there" you want to not come across a house. Is that accurate?

I DO like the idea of being able to get rent or build inside design-built cities. I still wish we had had that in SWG.

[schild]

I like Horizons' solution. Land pre-set in reasonable places for cities to go. It's just that simple. Then you can leave it up to the players to fill in the map with cities and worry about things like CONTENT.

[Fabricated]

I like Horizons' solution. Land pre-set in reasonable places for cities to go. It's just that simple. Then you can leave it up to the players to fill in the map with cities and worry about things like CONTENT.

Funny enough, I liked Horizon's crafting system in terms of how you could customize your items.

Sure, your "Iron Sword +2" is exactly the same as any other Iron Sword +2, but you could change the handle, blade, handguard, etc.

[Llava]

Could drop a few "hermit" lots out there as well- a clearing in a forest, for example, could have a cabin.  But that would be the only one in the forest.  On one hand, that house is far more visible to players because of its uniqueness.  On the other, that house is placed FAR away from the rest of "civilization" (players generally aren't looking to buy stuff when they're out adventuring, and whether a house owner has to manually visit his/her home or can teleport directly to the house but nowhere else, the distance makes life less convenient- you can't just run to the neighbor's house to borrow a cup of sugar so you can finish making that +4 cake... or buy a piece of iron ore to finish off that last sword).

I do think that hermit houses could work if you give them the right feel- the distance is a real drawback, and the land won't allow another city to spring up nearby.  You could even have monsters attack it infrequently if you can set that up so that it never happens when the player isn't aware of it.  Perhaps the owner has to pay extra tribute to the forest creatures to get them to leave the place alone.  If the house is burned to the ground, that lot opens back up for someone else to claim it.

But even after all that, chances are that it's too unique and special, while MMOGs seem to want everyone to be exactly the same.  Imagine the community backlash if there were only 15 hermit homes per server.  *gasp*  But they're all taken!  That's not fair!  I want one!  So maybe this is one of those nice things that we can't have.

Seems like fun to me, though.  Work your ass off to get a decent reputation with the wilderness critters so they don't rip down your house the second you build it, prop it up, set up a nice little oasis in the desert/refuge in the mountains/cabin in the forest.  Achievers and Explorers would both go orgasmic.  Socializers would thrive on the visibility and reputation such a system would create.

But, again, it has to be limited.  1 per zone max, and I'd really say just 1 every few zones.  And it needs to be DEEP in the zone, not right at the entrance.

[Margalis]

You know what I want in a MMORPG? The following:

Day 1, you log on. You find yourself in a big clearing with a bunch of other people. All you have is some shoes and clothing. Around you is a forest, and in the forest are some bad guys.

First thing you do is grab a stick and beat on a bad guy or something. He kills you. Then, a bunch of people team up and beat on a bad guy with their sticks, kill him, and one of them grabs his knife. With that knife you skin an animal, and start the process of making twine, bow strings, etc.

Over time you build fences, houses, then one day you manage to fight your way to a mine and from there you can start to create more advanced weapons. Etc etc...

That is what is meant by "explorer" gameplay. Exploring is not just wandering into a new zone. Exploring is discovering and creating, not just observing.

[schild]

I've written up a pretty thorough design document on the evolution through the ages concept in an MMOG. Though death really isn't in the cards that early. It's more about excavation, architecture, and other alternatives to straight combat. It's pretty pie in the sky shit though, and I still hesitate to post fleshed out ideas on this website anywhere.

[pants]

You know what I want in a MMORPG? The following:

Day 1, you log on. You find yourself in a big clearing with a bunch of other people. All you have is some shoes and clothing. Around you is a forest, and in the forest are some bad guys.

First thing you do is grab a stick and beat on a bad guy or something. He kills you. Then, a bunch of people team up and beat on a bad guy with their sticks, kill him, and one of them grabs his knife. With that knife you skin an animal, and start the process of making twine, bow strings, etc.

Over time you build fences, houses, then one day you manage to fight your way to a mine and from there you can start to create more advanced weapons. Etc etc...

That was the one thing that really excited me about Dawn.  Ignore the fetuspults and negative ping code, I loved the idea that the world would be essentially empty - and it was 100% up to the players to decide how to build it - where cities would be, if there would be roads built to the nearest mine/harbour etc etc.  Hell, they were planning to institute a /pray command, so people could invent their own religions - the more people /prayed, the more powerful their religion became.

Of course, that may be just the pure voice of naievity, and I realise we can't have nice things, but I thought that idea would be fascinating to play and to watch and see how it evolves.