Come help save mud history

[schild]

What games DID have lower snack-sized sessions? uh... SWG. ;)

This is a big, giant, crock of shit.

Average player session length (per session and per day) in SWG was dramatically lower than EQ, EQ2, EQOA, UO (I have no access to WoW stats, of course). Average monthly hours, however, was larger. The only conclusion is more sessions, shorter.

It's not even hard to see why. People checking in every day or so for a short time to check harvesters, vendors, and the like. Much more asynch, pop-in-pop-out behavior.

That's such a terrible way to gauge it though. Considering 90% of leveling any crafting class was pressing the same buttons over and over. I know how much time I spent and how many classes I mastered, but what it provided for wasn't "people playing in short bursts" it was "people stopping before their eyes bled out."

You can categorize it however you like, but it was one of the most frighteningly grindy experiences in modern gaming. Particularly for crafters. I'm sticking to talking about crafters because combat just wasn't worth leveling up

Edit: Oh right, the other 10%? Yea, that was spent trying to find expendable giant piles of resources or checking harvesters.

[schild]

Nope, you don't... I'm playing right now, haha. A friend said he had started playing on one of the old boards, and I joined him.

So, what bastard got the crystal shortsword?

[Slyfeind]

Game players want to be driven to game play. Giving them the tools to make their own fun has never had as much appeal commercially. The perfect hybrid of both could theoretically work, but so far we haven't seen that (it cost that much just to make a game)

Quite right. Among those who prefer WoW to UO, it would be a waste of time to convince them to play UO instead of WoW. Sandboxes don't have as much commercial appeal as WoW, but they have commercial appeal. (And honestly, I find them more fun.)

[UnSub]

As an aside, I always wish someone would copy the house-building from UO. Not the "fill up the world with urban blight" part, but the "design a custom building tile-by-tile" part they patched in a few expansions after Trammel. (Put it all in instances, whatever.) Then give everyone unlimited teleports back and forth between their home and wherever they were in the world. Like how in KOTOR you could poof back to your ship to swap party members, then back into the field to keep playing without having to do all that walking.

Then everyone can still run around the world being directed between locations, but you can still meet your friends "face to face" at the drop of a hat.

To be the CoH/V fanboi, but: CoH/V lets a supergroup build their base tile by tile on a set lot size. Here's an example. One of the veteran powers is supergroup base teleport.

It's not a perfect system - only the top rung of the SG get to build it, you can't invite who you want into it at the drop of a hat and the costs of doing anything fun until recently were extortionate. But it contains a lot of flexibility. Not a lot of players use the system as it stands (probably because not everyone is the leader of an SG / VG that can afford to run their own generators and teleport pads) but if player apartments are ever brought in with more flexibility in visitation, CoH/V would fit your requirements near perfectly.

[UnSub]

MUDs were built by and for the tech fringe looking to escape into the virtual, to be the vanguard of the metaverse. But that market is shrinking by percentage against the aggregate consumer market.

The MUDders I remember from my uni days were the guys who would sit in front of a dumb terminal for hours on end to MUD with some of the other guys sitting next to them. Should they somehow manage to land a geek girl, they'd train her to play the MUD so they could do it together.

Socialisation in MUDS appeared to come about because these people weren't that good in communication in RL, so they did it by proxy in the game. They'd probably be offended at being called "gamers" too.

I like how "come help save MUD history" turned into "what have MUDs ever done for us?" followed by "MUDs suck! When are we going to get UO redone?". Yeah, I know - Welcome to F13. 

[WindupAtheist]

That's pretty cool, didn't know COH/V did that. I wish WoW would rip some of this shit off. It's not the sort of thing Blizzard usually goes for, but the fact is the game needs gold sinks and they can't keep selling increasingly jacked-up mounts forever. Houses and furniture and fluff are a great way to make people spend money without actually touching game balance at all.

I kinda want to play some more UO now. It's been increasingly strongly implied that Luna, the city that superceded Britain as the primary social hub on a lot of shards, is about to get the shit more or less blown out of it. I love that kind of stuff, and since they figured out how to do destructible buildings a couple years ago, blowing the shit out of stuff is a much more intriguing prospect.

Then again, eh. Depends on whether any of my friends give a shit. They're kinda enjoying WoW at the moment. So am I, really.

/ramble

[Fordel]

Blizzard isn't going to put housing in until they can figure something out that will make housing useful without killing capital populations. So like, never. They refuse to make it for the sake of making it currently, which is a bummer.

[WindupAtheist]

Unless they've got banks and auction houses in them, and are linked to the trade channel, why would houses kill capital populations? God knows UO houses didn't stop banksitting from practically becoming an Olympic sport. It would kill the "night elves cyberfucking in the Deeprun Tram tunnel" population though, which is a blessing unto itself.

[Ingmar]

Unless they've got banks and auction houses in them, and are linked to the trade channel, why would houses kill capital populations? God knows UO houses didn't stop banksitting from practically becoming an Olympic sport. It would kill the "night elves cyberfucking in the Deeprun Tram tunnel" population though, which is a blessing unto itself.

But where will we get cyber screenshots to post on the realm forums if that happens?

[Fordel]

Unless they've got banks and auction houses in them, and are linked to the trade channel, why would houses kill capital populations? God knows UO houses didn't stop banksitting from practically becoming an Olympic sport. It would kill the "night elves cyberfucking in the Deeprun Tram tunnel" population though, which is a blessing unto itself.

That's exactly it. If they don't have those things, then it's just 'The Sims' in warcraft. Which would be enough for most of us, but Blizzard wants housing to be something more.

What this magical more is supposed to be? /shrug.

[WindupAtheist]

I kinda figure there's a WoW housing system sketched out on a whiteboard somewhere in Blizzard HQ, and we don't know about it because they're Blizzard and don't really tell us shit until they have something to show for it. When the game gets a little older, subs finally peak, players are getting a little too rich, then it'll be time. Hell, friggin' Kalgan used to be Evocare, lead designer on the UO expansion that added that tile-by-tile house building I love.

[Fordel]

There were prototypes for guild housing in a alpha or early beta or something. Some idea's of even letting rival guilds attack them while you defend or something. Nothing really tangible though.

[FatuousTwat]

Nope, you don't... I'm playing right now, haha. A friend said he had started playing on one of the old boards, and I joined him.

So, what bastard got the crystal shortsword?

No clue, I'm dualing druid and warrior.

[Venkman]

Players will migrate to the easiest most central spot if designed one, or create their own when the level doesn't compel them too (ie, EQ1: docks in Oasis, EC Tunnel pre-Bazaar, etc).

Banksitting didn't stop in UO, but the real/veteran commerce was done in houses and malls. The main cities were for newbs only from what I recall, and for the occasional bank visit. But for every award-winning fish tank in UO, there seemed to be a dozen empty oversized bankslots. With all the effort put into these tools, how many pre-3D people actually bothered? The memories of these places are great, but it's because we don't remember the blight of vacant slums.

WoW created these social hubs through /trade, banks, AH, and general crafting stations all in the same locations. And the player population didn't splinter when they added AHs to the other cities. What's the point of housing? Cool place to sink gold into occasionally and eventually forget? I agree they'll probably come at WoW's apex, but what I'd rather see if just guild halls, modelled around the SWG ones (except with doors ;-) ) where players could own rooms therein. Create a single city just for the guildhalls of the faction, make it part of the next expansion. With this one, they picked up a whole city and floated it over the new lands. Next one they should pick up a land mass and use phase 1 pre-expansion-launch to allow players to populate it through achievement (ala the unlocking of Sunwell).

Man I'm tired. Need stronger coffee.

[Slyfeind]

Another option would be to put player housing in capital cities (instanced, duh), and players use their homes as free teleports to the capitol of their choice. Weird that nobody's tried this before.

[Ratman_tf]

Another option would be to put player housing in capital cities (instanced, duh), and players use their homes as free teleports to the capitol of their choice. Weird that nobody's tried this before.

That sounds like the most "Blizzard-ish" way to go with player housing. I can imagine a guild headquarters with trophies and furniture based on guild achievements in addition to the usual knick knacks and whatnots.

[Raph]

What games DID have lower snack-sized sessions? uh... SWG. ;)

This is a big, giant, crock of shit.

Average player session length (per session and per day) in SWG was dramatically lower than EQ, EQ2, EQOA, UO (I have no access to WoW stats, of course). Average monthly hours, however, was larger. The only conclusion is more sessions, shorter.

It's not even hard to see why. People checking in every day or so for a short time to check harvesters, vendors, and the like. Much more asynch, pop-in-pop-out behavior.

That's such a terrible way to gauge it though. Considering 90% of leveling any crafting class was pressing the same buttons over and over. I know how much time I spent and how many classes I mastered, but what it provided for wasn't "people playing in short bursts" it was "people stopping before their eyes bled out."

You can categorize it however you like, but it was one of the most frighteningly grindy experiences in modern gaming. Particularly for crafters. I'm sticking to talking about crafters because combat just wasn't worth leveling up

Edit: Oh right, the other 10%? Yea, that was spent trying to find expendable giant piles of resources or checking harvesters.

It occurs to me that this is almost exactly the same game as tending Pokey on Facebook, or whatever.

Anyway -- the point wasn't the grindiness, it was the session lengths. You said "crock of shit," I offered vague yet authoritative-sounding references to stats, you changed the subject. :)

It's worth wondering whether it was the advancement ladder that made it grindy. Hmm. I mean, isn't crafting in WoW also pressing the same buttons over and over?

[Venkman]

You can automatically craft multiples in WoW. You can craft X of a thing as long as you have the resources just by pressing one button to start the automation. But then, WoW doesn't really have crafting game. It has a resource gathering one. Which honestly I've always wondered about: why bother having a skill progression when you're not really doing a skill? Of course, that's the model for many of these games, so I'm like 10 years late to asking this question ;-)

I think the grindiness is as we recently discussed (this thread or another, can't remember). It's not time from start to some ethereal "finish", since that doesn't exist. It's time between milestones, where those are most often some critical new ability or stat adjustment that matters.

[Nyght]

It's worth wondering whether it was the advancement ladder that made it grindy. Hmm. I mean, isn't crafting in WoW also pressing the same buttons over and over?

For crafting, usefulness (or lack there of) of gathered resources and crafted items is everything.

As an example of this, a very top end tool (player skill) was auctioned in ATITD yesterday for a quantity of a resource that newbs are instructed to gather as the first or second gathered item when they learn the game.

Yes, its grindy as hell to gather the stuff, but that alone gives it value and a 1 hour trial character could have reasonably won the bid and acquired this tool. His time would be valuable and the tool would be valuable to him.

You know the issue: in game time, subscription age, or player skill. Making equivalencies and allowing player choice of approach is the answer.

[schild]

What games DID have lower snack-sized sessions? uh... SWG. ;)

This is a big, giant, crock of shit.

Average player session length (per session and per day) in SWG was dramatically lower than EQ, EQ2, EQOA, UO (I have no access to WoW stats, of course). Average monthly hours, however, was larger. The only conclusion is more sessions, shorter.

It's not even hard to see why. People checking in every day or so for a short time to check harvesters, vendors, and the like. Much more asynch, pop-in-pop-out behavior.

That's such a terrible way to gauge it though. Considering 90% of leveling any crafting class was pressing the same buttons over and over. I know how much time I spent and how many classes I mastered, but what it provided for wasn't "people playing in short bursts" it was "people stopping before their eyes bled out."

You can categorize it however you like, but it was one of the most frighteningly grindy experiences in modern gaming. Particularly for crafters. I'm sticking to talking about crafters because combat just wasn't worth leveling up

Edit: Oh right, the other 10%? Yea, that was spent trying to find expendable giant piles of resources or checking harvesters.

It occurs to me that this is almost exactly the same game as tending Pokey on Facebook, or whatever.

Anyway -- the point wasn't the grindiness, it was the session lengths. You said "crock of shit," I offered vague yet authoritative-sounding references to stats, you changed the subject. :)

It's worth wondering whether it was the advancement ladder that made it grindy. Hmm. I mean, isn't crafting in WoW also pressing the same buttons over and over?

I didn't change the subject. I gave you the exact reason you saw a metric that translated to "bite-size" which leads me to believe you didn't go in there and watch people play the game in real time. Why do you think there were macros for almost everything? Don't get me wrong, I liked the game, but I'm just saying exactly how it was. Smugglers had to grind the hell out of the tiers to get to the good drugs. Dancers afk'd to get to their more ridiculous dancers. Architects, god, don't even get me started on architects. Armorsmiths, weaponsmiths - the reason things like Krayt Tissue FWG-5s took so long to discover is because people not only had to find efficient ways to get Krayt tissues (which was eventually completely soloable by my smuggler, stack DoTs and play dead), but weaponsmiths were too busy grinding to really experiment. Same with armorsmiths, it took months to find out how to make good composite armor.

It was a big, huge grindy mess and the ladder of advancement quickly approached nightmarish. Game had more "levels" than any other MMOG that comes to mind.

The reason I mastered as much as I did? College.

Edit: In other words, "bite size" gameplay sessions for SWG was a matter of improper reading of metrics.

[WindupAtheist]

The memories of these places are great, but it's because we don't remember the blight of vacant slums.

Wait, what? I'm not fondly remembering 1998 here, I was just playing a couple months ago. Vendor-malls are good to buy from if you just need to find X now and buy it at a premium, or if you're a seller who deals in bulk. Barking at the bank is good if you're looking to go the extra step to buy something for less, or if you're someone who's not really a big trader but happens to have something valuable to sell. And while you see the occasional house that's just a blank plot with some containers on it to throw loot into, virtually everyone builds something way more complex than what they have any concrete "need" for. I suspect most of the blank-with-loot plots are storage for multi-account packrats who already have a "real" house anyway.

As for urban blight, yeah, whenever you pack houses together out in the world it's going to look lonely since the odds of people being both online and at their house at any particular hour aren't high.

What's the point of housing?

Nothing. It's a gold sink, a toy, an e-peen showcase where you can hang your "obsolete now but uber to own back in the day" sword on the wall. When you start talking about guild-halls with trophies and sieges or whatever, my eyes just glaze over. I don't really care if my guild leader can own a house, or if it has Onyxia's head (or whatever) on the wall.

[Venkman]

Yea, but you're rare. The people who remember housing remember the urban blight of UO which we saw again in even greater force in SWG.
But even that's a side issue, since it supports my point from earlier: Blizzard wants people to be together in social hubs. They designed the game around that. I didn't play UO before housing, so I don't know how if the playerbase spread to the four winds once all the major plots were taken. But I suspect Blizzard is concerned by this very thing and how that'd impact a) the social hubs; and, b) the newbs.

And back to the other question: what's the point? Almost everything in WoW has some point to it, with just-toys relegated to things like companion pets. This is a game that doesn't even have EQ2's aesthetics-only wardrobe function (and yet people tailor outfits anyway, for occasion). Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have a Gnome-inspired fully-customizable house in which everything I've got sitting in my bank slots is actually represented by a 3D model that can be moved into some three dimensional location within. But that's of the if-wishes-were-horses variety because of how Blizzard thinks.

They made a game, not a world. They don't care about "immersion" in the way other older games prioritized it.

[Slyfeind]

UO started with housing, and all the major plots were taken in less than a year. It changed nothing about player traffic and the major hubs. In fact, just six months ago, the Britain bank was packed with the most uber of the uber, just as it was ten years ago.

SWG also shipped with housing, and again all the major plots were taken quickly. That changed nothing about player traffic, though I haven't played it in a couple years, I wonder if even now the spaceports are still gathering places.

AC added housing a few years after launch, and those had the functions of secure storage and a teleport location. They also were built around little villages, and cool ones at that. Again, I haven't played it in years, so that might have changed, but for the next year players still gathered at the major transport areas of Fort Tethana and Subway.

So far, no matter how useful housing is, it's proven impossible to divert player traffic with it. I suspect Blizzard could even encourage player traffic if they wanted to.

[Fordel]

DaoC added housing and it killed the capital cities within a week.

[FatuousTwat]

DaoC added housing and it killed the capital cities within a week.

QFT.

Put a vault and craft npc in your house and the only reason to go to TNN was to talk to the epic quest giver once every 10 levels or so.

[Raph]

I didn't change the subject. I gave you the exact reason you saw a metric that translated to "bite-size" which leads me to believe you didn't go in there and watch people play the game in real time. Why do you think there were macros for almost everything? Don't get me wrong, I liked the game, but I'm just saying exactly how it was. Smugglers had to grind the hell out of the tiers to get to the good drugs. Dancers afk'd to get to their more ridiculous dancers. Architects, god, don't even get me started on architects. Armorsmiths, weaponsmiths - the reason things like Krayt Tissue FWG-5s took so long to discover is because people not only had to find efficient ways to get Krayt tissues (which was eventually completely soloable by my smuggler, stack DoTs and play dead), but weaponsmiths were too busy grinding to really experiment. Same with armorsmiths, it took months to find out how to make good composite armor.

It was a big, huge grindy mess and the ladder of advancement quickly approached nightmarish. Game had more "levels" than any other MMOG that comes to mind.

The reason I mastered as much as I did? College.

Edit: In other words, "bite size" gameplay sessions for SWG was a matter of improper reading of metrics.

Sigh.

The topic was length of session. That's what Darniaq was describing. That's what we were talking about. Short sessions. That's what the stats were. Short sessions. Whether the sessions all consisted of repeated grindy clicking is beside the point. SWG may have been grindy, but it was not a "you have to sit online for 6 hours to the next milestone." You could log off (and people DID) at any stage along the way.

This is different from what drove long sessions in the other games, which is that the process of play was not interruptible. Once you were on the raid, or deep in whatever dungeon, that was it, you had to go all the way to the end. You had to have the group, which took a long time to assemble. And so on.

Don't get me wrong, SWG had plenty of repetitive dull stuff in it, and it also had plenty of timesinks that were in the way. But you could do a game session that moved the needle in less time than in other games, hence the lower sessions. For some profs, you didn't need to log on to move the needle. That was my sole point. Many of the random asynch amusements like Pokey on Facebook are equally mindless clicks, but you get done in 30 seconds, which was the only point I was making there.

[schild]

My problem is that your takeaway from SWG is completely wrong. Calling it bite-sized sessions is incorrect because it somehow implies a positive. Which it wasn't, I don't log out of facebook in disgust because I didn't get much done in my "mindless clicking."

In fact, it's a pretty terrible thing to take away from SWG. I would ask myself "Why are people logging out" rather than "Hey, look at us! People log in more over a month but play less! The sum is greater than its parts!"

Also, I can log into any MMOG and get something done in a "bite sized" session - it's all a matter of defining based on the games parameters. I can do a quest in WoW in 30 minutes. I can get a level (if you're under 40) in AoC in 30 minutes. I can even log into Eve and get some ratting done in 30 minutes. Nothing was "new" or invented here that hadn't existed on the PC in single player games for years prior. Hell, not even in console games post the Nintendo era. And we're not even getting into gaming with the ability to save states.

In short, you can leave ANY game at ANY stage - AND people do. In SW:G, you have to look at what drove them to log out at "any stage." And it assuredly wasn't them logging in and saying "man, I'm just gonna grind 30 more Thrusterheads and I'll be that much closer to Neutron Pixie," it was "Ah fuck, might as well get these 230 Thrusterheads out of the way. Wat? I don't have enough resources? Tomorrow then. /quit"

Look, I loved SW:G, but I think your metric and memories of it are entirely flawed.

[schild]

Not to mention, features like "alt-tab" "windowed" etc were unreliable. Session lengths these days, particularly in Eve and WoW (Hell, even EQ2), sitting around AFK, are completely unreliable.

Basically, I disagree with what you said.

[tkinnun0]

isn't crafting in WoW also pressing the same buttons over and over?

Only in the most pedantic sense. For one, like Darniaq mentioned, you can craft multiple items in one go. More fundamentally, crafting recipes are color-coded by your skill. Crafting an orange recipe is guaranteed to give a skill-up. Once you buy a new recipe you are guaranteed 5-30 skill-ups before the recipe turns yellow. And once that happens, there are several new recipes available.

[Margalis]

Is "average" the mean, median or mode?

If people are firing up SWG once a day to spend 2 minutes checking their store in addition to playing 'normally' at other times that lowers the mean time per login but doesn't really say anything meaningful about the game.

I could lower the average play session length of FFXI by making it delete your character if you didn't log in once every 24 hours. And?

[Lantyssa]

I could lower the average play session length of FFXI by making it delete your character if you didn't log in once every 24 hours. And?

That reminds me of my old MUD's rent system before they were finally convinced to ditch it.

[Venkman]

I suspect Blizzard could even encourage player traffic if they wanted to.

UO and SWG had hubs and housing at launch. To your point, AC1 later had housing and that didn't spread everyone out, because of existing hubs. I didn't play DAoC when that housing went in but reports were that it did nuke social centers.

But I'm not saying it's a foregone conclusion that Ironforge would die, just that Blizzard probably has figured out to their satisfaction what "encourage player traffic" actually means. I do think AC1's neighborhoods worked pretty well against the world itself and to motivate players in certain ways. I just wonder if anyone at Blizzard ever played it 

Whether the sessions all consisted of repeated grindy clicking is beside the point. SWG may have been grindy, but it was not a "you have to sit online for 6 hours to the next milestone." You could log off (and people DID) at any stage along the way.

This exposes a difference in "doing something" and "advancing in the game system" though. That I think is what schild is referring to. I wasn't originally, but now I will too 

• I often logged into SWG to check harvesters, email, my vendor, and do some quick selling at Coronet. None of these rewarded any skill advancements though. For awhile, I was a crappy BH with Survey III because to play the game I played (energy business), that's all I needed. That granted me money, but all I did was feed that back into better fusion generators. I sort of existed outside the game system, more in the world proper. Same thing when I started a home decorating business. SWG was many systems in which game play featured in only some.
  
• With DAoEQ1WoW though, you're only path of substantive advancement is how the game defines it. Your session is measured by XP or gold put against item/improvements that also adjusted states. These are really just character optimization games, so the only thing to actually do was optimize, as defined by the foils and gates of the game. WoW is only one game.
  
  

That's the difference. SWG felt very grindy to people trying to play it as the type of game many of the other MMOs are.

[Merusk]

You're also not mentioning the driven NEED to login in SWG.  Yeah, my play sessions were much lower on average, but I was logging-in 2-3 more times than I have in any other MMO.   I *needed* to swap out materials in a factory. I *needed* to check resources to see if they'd shifted in the overnight or while I was at work.  I *needed* to make sure my vendors were still stocked or the price of the area hadn't shifted putting me way over priced.

I never felt a need-to-login grind in a DIKU like I felt it in SWG.  As I've said before it felt more like a job than a game, and when I realized that SOE stopped getting my $15.

[Raph]

Megaquotefestresponse...

You're also not mentioning the driven NEED to login in SWG.  Yeah, my play sessions were much lower on average, but I was logging-in 2-3 more times than I have in any other MMO.   I *needed* to swap out materials in a factory. I *needed* to check resources to see if they'd shifted in the overnight or while I was at work.  I *needed* to make sure my vendors were still stocked or the price of the area hadn't shifted putting me way over priced.

I never felt a need-to-login grind in a DIKU like I felt it in SWG.  As I've said before it felt more like a job than a game, and when I realized that SOE stopped getting my $15.

To bring it back to the original topic: you clearly never played a Diku with "rent," where your saved equipment was eating away at your in-game bank account every single day, and you had to come back to refill the gold balance or your stuff would start vanishing, most expensive first.

Interestingly, the "need to login and grind" factor is exactly what turns me off of Dikus. If I don't, then I can't hang out with anyone I know because they have outlevelled me. YMMV, based on playstyle.

But I think Darniaq has the right of it. It depended heavily on what you trying to do in the game. You could run a large business pretty well with the sort of hit-and-run restock, brief sessions every couple of days thing. And if running the business felt like work (which I can totally see), then it feels unfun and grindy. Or it could feel like a fun subgame that didn't take huge amounts of attention -- we shouldn't let revisionism make us forget that plenty of folks held that opinion. I dodisagree that this was "outside of the game system." That IS the game system we designed for that subgame.

Margalis, I had histograms.

Only in the most pedantic sense. For one, like Darniaq mentioned, you can craft multiple items in one go. More fundamentally, crafting recipes are color-coded by your skill. Crafting an orange recipe is guaranteed to give a skill-up. Once you buy a new recipe you are guaranteed 5-30 skill-ups before the recipe turns yellow. And once that happens, there are several new recipes available.

Your paragraph gave me cognitive dissonance, tkinnon0. "Only in the most pedantic sense. You can make more than one item in one go, and more fundamentally, the multiplicity of items is only there as a mark on a ruler, since any given recipe you buy is guaranteed to be 5-30 of exactly the same action with exactly the same result, then you have another ruler with hash marks on it." I mean, for me, you described the essence of repetitive clicking. Again, your mileage may vary. :)

Schild:

Also, I can log into any MMOG and get something done in a "bite sized" session - it's all a matter of defining based on the games parameters. I can do a quest in WoW in 30 minutes. I can get a level (if you're under 40) in AoC in 30 minutes. I can even log into Eve and get some ratting done in 30 minutes. Nothing was "new" or invented here that hadn't existed on the PC in single player games for years prior. Hell, not even in console games post the Nintendo era. And we're not even getting into gaming with the ability to save states.

In short, you can leave ANY game at ANY stage - AND people do.

Remember when SWG was made. There was no Eve, there was no AoC, there was no WoW. Do you really not remember taking 30 mins just to find the group you required to be able to kill anything of your level? It really wasn't a landscape of 30 minute sessions back then, regardless of what single-player games were doing. That was one of the big bugaboos that everyone, you guys included, bitched about.

Agh, I am soooo sick of arguing about SWG. Time has moved past it. But look, none of these drivers of shorter sessions were in the other games with the exception of UO in some cases:

- short missions available on demand in any town
- crafting-related stuff that netted advancement/money/goods for your character while you were offline
- subgames that could be done with very shallow dips in and out
- easy to shift between tracks so you could pick an activity that fit your schedule

SWG was designed on purpose to have a big asynch element, and more of a short session element. A lot of it didn't work. It sure wasn't finished, and a bunch of those individual subgames were not fun enough. Nonetheless, all this was there, and it had a measurable impact. Many of these things ARE in WoW and EVE now, often in barely recognizable forms (And I am not saying they got those things from SWG by any means).

What is also still there is that high-end WoW demands raiding, and raiding demands long sessions and complex prep similar to what doing *anything* involved in EQ. Why this is controversial, I don't know.  It's a simple observation, not a criticism. It is also, in fact, one of many ppl's chief gripe with WoW, that the game changes. And in this very thread, both that and "the game doesn't start until you get to [insert raiding lvl]" have been said. Which could have been cut and pasted from an EQ forum in 1999.

Hence (you knew I would drag it back here) the desire to get this shit written down in that Wiki, so that we at least know that we're repeating history.

[DLRiley]

Please stop defending grindy simulators.