f13.net

http://www.raphkoster.com/2012/08/30/online-game-legend/

 :uhrr:

You're younger than I am? WTF?

Anyhow, I'll get a congrats in now before the vultures start picking you apart. I blame you for UO, and UO started me on the path that shaped much of my current life - so thanks.

Heh- congrats Raph.

Congrats Raph!

Is there any monetary reward with this??

Congrats. And honestly, although this is not necessarily what you are wishing for yourself, I wish this could grant you some crazy investors money to make, out of all the things on your shelves, a new sandbox MMO. For real.

No. I think I get a metal-and-glass brick like this one.

(http://www.essex.ac.uk/csee/department/news/newsletter/ial1.jpg)

Nice :)

I remember reading your essays back during the UO days ("a story about a tree", etc.). the hectic times as Designer Dragon over at Xroads of Britannia and other places; the lenghty posts as Holocron on the SWG pre-beta boards and I keep on stalking following your career with interest, hoping for a newly found interest in sandbox MMOs :)

You will be fondly rememb....err, I mean, congrats  :grin: for all you have achieved and your productive mind.

In response to thread title: yes we can.  :grin:

Gratz, Raph!

(http://spla.sh/bp/meet_gypsy_files/bone4_files/s4f6.jpg)

Grats Raph!  For a few precious months in 1999 (prior to removal of house looting), you made the only perfect game that has ever or will ever exist.  Everything since then has been ashes and dust in our mouths, but that's the cost of perfection. 

Congratulations :awesome_for_real:

Congratulations, Raph.

Now, when do we get to hear about the Next Big Thing? (so that we can tear it to shreds in our ever-gnawing criti-teeth)

Raph's just a boy and I'd attempt to adopt him since he usually has a job, but I have a strict rule of not adopting people who I can't snark at.  Dammit.  If you were a cat, though, Raph, if you were a cat you would be SO adopted!  Gratz!  You dinged a fancy brick!  Well done.

Grats!   :awesome_for_real:

I have not been your biggest fan but congrats for an award well-earned.  UO was a flawed but great game.  We sure could use a modern UO...hint, hint.

Grats!

The award is well deserved, but we're still gonna snark you. Such is the price of greatness.

Congratulations Raph! 

While the snark will continue, we all appreciate your contributions.... particularly to the Guitar thread!

Excellent. We can graduate from snarking to pulling on Superman's cape!

Congratulations, well-deserved recognition.

Congrats!

Don't be too hard on yourself.  One thing you have going for you is that you're willing to explore new ideas.  You're willing to look at what works and what doesn't, and importantly, admit a system you made isn't the best thing since sliced bread.  In an industry that pumps out clone after clone, folks like you are important if we're ever to see something different.  You can quibble over whether it should be you, or Mark, or Jessica, or whomever, but someone has to get it.  Why not the guy who's a pleasure to work with, passionate about the craft, loves exploring theory, and has inspired others?

It's deserved, and the others will get their due in time.  I for one, am happy that it's you.

/fangirl

Congratulations, Raph! You (and your work!) have, for more than one and a half decade, been an inspiration to many a budding game-designer. Thank you.

Congratulations Raph.

Nice one.

Both sentiments, echoed.

You should probably get into board gaming, the gaming industry is worse than the music industry.

Congrats Raph!

I was with you until I clicked the link:


(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/39720/smilies/10ic3t2.png)


Really, really?

Congratulations Raph and thanks for getting me hooked on MMOs.

Congrats! Grief title should also be awarded with new shiny brick imo.

We all thought the same thing when we read that part, but he is just trying to be diplomatic.  Don't blast him for that.

We need a sandbox MMO now more than ever. Get chopping!

My feelings exactly.

Also, TRAMMEL WAAARGBLE CHARTS RETENTION PK TRAMMEL HOLYCRONS BAAARRRGLE.

Just to get that out of the way for the rest of the retards.

I actually opened the thread thinking this was why we would be less snarky to him, because of a new MMO announcement.

Congrats Raph on the "legend" award. Also younger than me. I was thinking reading your blog article that the award was the ultimate in snark, but then again they don't have a lifetime achievement for hosting the most MMO panels. I certainly consider you an MMO legend though, so it's well deserved. Gratz again.

Does this now make you an "award winning" developer?

Congratulations Raph.

I met you at GDC in 2000 or 2001 I think it was, in San Jose. I also remember following many discussions on MUD-Dev which involved a lot of the great minds in this space - including yours.
While I don't work in game development these days, my work benefits from the skills I learned as a MUD development hobbyist driven largely by folks like yourself.

Thank you!

Um, I kind of already was. How quickly you all forget.  :grin: From the CV on my website:

Never heard of those games. Where they any good? :why_so_serious:

Meatplace.com?  :grin:

Uh, not that I meant to reply to the thread with just more brag. :P

The reason why I say some of those pioneers maybe should get it before me is because, well, they predate my arrival on the scene. Randy & Chip (& Doug Crockford with them) did a HUGE amount of fundamental stuff and already got one other Pioneer award from GDC. People here think of Mark Jacobs solely in terms of DAoC or Warhammer, forgetting the years of stuff back no AOL. Same with Jessica Mulligan's work with GEnie.

[ill-advised angst in public]

As far as the "really really" part... why is it odd that this causes introspection on the "now what?" front? I mean, yeah, everyone is crawling out of the woodwork saying "build us a new sandbox MMO!" And maybe that is what you meant. I am pretty sure there is at minimum a great lifestyle business there and possibly something much bigger, sure. But it has tradeoffs -- for one, it's expensive enough that you can't do it small. You need funding, and that means strings attached all over the place, and running a business, etc. And I know exactly how time consuming, family-destroying, health-crushing that is. The Metaplace experience landed me in the hospital and on heart medication.

I also meant it about the stuff I haven't done. I DO want to write. It was first love, before games. I am pretty good at it too. People don't know this, usually, but I fit in fine at writing workshops with a lot of SF/F writers you have heard of, they invite me in. (There's a part of me that goes "yeah, but games are TODAY'S medium," no question...)

I DO want to do more with the music. I realize that none of you expect a tiny fanbase maybe in the Guitar Thread actually care about the latter, but *I* do. I have never gigged except for those online MP concerts. Playing a show of original material to 20 people would be, no joke, a highlight of my life.

Making some small indie games would be immensely fun, and the best times in my career have always been with tiny teams (early UO, early SWG, the awesome stuff we did at SEO R&D that nobody ever got to see, early MP were all like that). The worst have always been the big team times. And I have a LARGE backlog of little games that are begging to be on an iPad or iPhone. There's no built in audience there, you all want a sandbox MMO instead, it'd be starting over.

Making more games would basically be saying "next is a bigger lifetime achievement award" or something. Maybe I should try to get a lifetime achievement award in something ELSE, you know?

I dunno... Let's put it this way... this is sort of like finishing volume one of a book. Is volume 2 going to be more of the same, or is the plot going in new directions, you know? I really do feel super ambivalent about it.

[/ill-advised angst]

I honestly can't even make a post without being unreasonably mean since online gaming has been the same people durdling around spending hundreds of millions of fucking dollars a year to result in next to nothing. Also, this is hard because I like you and I think you have some good ideas - but Metaplace was totally more of that durdling around. Star Wars Galaxies, much as I loved it, was Durdling Online: The Game.

Let's not pat ourselves on the back too much for this one, cool?

See now, there's the snark I was counting on!  :awesome_for_real:

A wild Schild appears!

Snark implies sarcasm.

I think I played C|NET once. 

And, by the way you guys, I'm older than most of you and I like it that way.  It makes me feel... umm... well... old, I guess. never-mind.

Only you can decide if the cost is worth it, but I doubt anyone believes you have done all you can do in the MMO space.

The word "durdling" alone pushes it over the line for me. I mean, it's such an awesome word. "Durdling." DURdling. I may just sit and repeat it all day.

Go for the lifetime achievement, imo.

Hey Raph you responded to my post not tazel's about the award winning developer comment (so your quote referenced the post I was quoting). I did not mean "award winning games" or stuff you were associated with, I meant that this was an award solely for you being a developer. Saying you worked on/lead "award winning projects" is different than saying you're an "award winning developer".

Do what you love.  Screw everyone else.

So when are you going to make another game.

Congrats, Raph.  Seriously, you earned it.

--Dave

I do that sometimes.  The other day it was the word "explicit".  Some one said it on the telly and I repeated and couldn't stop saying it.  When I do this at home, my sister checks my pupils.  She's a worrier.  Explicit.

Explicit.  Sort of just needs to be said again and again.

STOP PUTTING THOUGHTS IN MY HEAD. I WORK IN A PUBLIC SPACE WHERE PEOPLE ARE LOOKING AT ME MOST OF THE TIME.

Jeez, man. I've pushed myself doing OT in QA a few times, but nothing is worth your health. Can't participate in putting a game out if you're dead...

That looks handy! You can use it to smite your detractors.

Ding gratz and all that, for an award well-earned.

Rather (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=TibA0sQQZw8#t=148s)

If I weren't lazy I'd dub "Game Designer" over "Hero."  EDIT: maybe "Durdler" over "Dark Knight." :why_so_serious:

Congratulations, Raph.

Does this mean we can make a swg thread outside of the graveyard?

Anyway, grats on the ding.

You should know better than to throw down the gauntlet like you did in the title of this thread, Raph.

Congratulations!

My star-fucking of Raph is what brought me to wt.o, and my love for UO has never been a secret around these parts. Thank you for your part in making a dream (for us early PC adopters) a reality. Those were some awesome experiences, and even with SWG falling short it still had its own charms.

Regardless of where you go from here, you have my respect and thanks (and curses) for hundreds of hours of MMOs since you hit the scene. Congrats, Raph.

 

Why not try something that truly hasn't been done before but would still scratch the sandbox itch -- thread the needle between Sandbox and Theme Park with a 'small world, many servers' design? A level-less (or not terribly leveling-dependent) game that feels in many respects like a single-player game, but where other players take over many of the key roles from NPCs over time as the server evolves, and it works because you have a small number of players per server (between 50 and 200, let's say) with thousands of servers. A game where over time you can actually become the king, or the rogue assassin hunted by his troops, or any other number of roles, not because you catassed the most a-la Korean MMOs like Lineage, but rather because there are only 200 users per server, and potentially thousands of servers, with each of them taking the world to a very different place?

I imagine this game being 2D, and looking something like Zelda: A Link to the Past -- simply because it's so much easier to do dynamic content and art assets in that medium. Nobody's tried it yet, and it feels like something you could do amazing things with.

Heck, link up with Mojang. Would love to see what you could come up with.

True!