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I sought long and hard for just the games you mentioned after Myst Online crashed for the second time, and the only thing I found is A Tale of the Desert. This game exactly suits your needs, I think. No violence, you can trade stuff you grew or made, etc. I never played it because I basically want MystOnline to be back online, but I think you should give it a try.

When I read that the average age of the WoW player is 32, I was shocked. I read the boards for maybe a week before it just began to disgust me, and I havent been back.

The average age of the player base != the average age of the forum posting base. Most of the 20- and 30-somethings I know that play WoW don't post, and on the other side of things, adolescents tend to love the sound of their own voices.

If I was a developer, I'd REQUIRE insulation from that kind of thing.

Having been there, I found that people tend to behave the way you expect.

Read that again.

If you set things up expecting them to behave like immature nitwits, this will come out in your design decisions, in the way you address them, and in the way you talk to them. And they will act like immature nitwits.

Contrast this to a game like A Tale in the Desert, whose lead developer once broadcast his cell phone number in case a pending rollout caused problems for anyone. Given that level of trust (which permeates the game), people tend to act much more mature there.

Try A Tale in the Desert :)

I'll tell you, this is a place I would attend daily. DDR is great fun - I've gotten so into it that I built my own studio, but doing it alone isn't as much fun as I'd imagine a health club setting.

Great to hear what he's up to these days. He's the third professor in this story from my days at CMU. Brad, if you're reading this, all that videogame stuff wasn't a waste of time after all.

I read thru BondedSender's terms of service. Their allowed complaint rate is 1 per 1,000,000 messages sent. Each complaint over that limit deducts $20 from the sender's bond.

As someone that does legitimate commercial mailings (opt-in, for our MMORPG, about 15,000 messages per month to current and past players), this strikes me as slightly expensive, and somewhat dangerous. Some math...

Typically I get about 10 angry letters per newsletter, so that's $200 to send each newsletter. A cost of 1.3 cents per email isn't bad, since I know that most people read what I send.

Two problems. First, most newsletters go through now. Maybe 10% get spam filtered (I should probably set up a way to track this). So reaching those additional people costs 13 cents each. That is expensive.

Second, I worry that if the system becomes well known, it would be griefed: A single player with a bone to pick would sign up under a bunch of email addresses and "complain" from each. I'm not sure how to resolve this.

When I was an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon in 1989, I decided it would be fun to make a game (actually a system for making platform games) as my senior project. I was really psyched about this, and figured that any professor would be honored to be my advisor on such an innovative project.

I set out looking for an advisor. I picked one of CMU's best known professors. I called his secretary, made an appointment, and described my idea. His response? "Do you know who I am? There is *no way in hell* that I am attaching my name to a video game."

Bah, his loss. I set out to find another professor to serve as advisor. I wandered around the halls until I found a professor that I had for a class once. This guy wasn't a big shot. He didn't have a secretary, and didn't have such a big office, but that was ok. I jazzed up my presentation a bit, threw in a few buzzwords of the day: "It's an 'object oriented' system for 'rapid application development' of a class of interactive entertainment, blah blah blah.

He was intrigued! "Hmm, object oriented, rapid applica... Er, wait a minute - this is a video game? No, I'm not putting my name on that."

Ok, so no cigar just yet, but I was picking up on a trend. I wandered around some more. I went deep into the lower levels of Wean Hall. I walked down a corridor carved out of solid rock - the offices here were the size of closets, and they didn't even have windows. I found someone who appeared to have just been hired, and gave my pitch, filled with as many ridiculous buzzwords as I could think up. He mulled it over "object oriented, um, rapid stuff, um, 'Oh, you mean a video game! Yeah, cool, I'll be your advisor for that!'"

So I found my advisor. He didn't get fired for putting his name of a Senior Project video game, and it came out pretty good in the end, and nobody else got embarrassed.

BUT

Looks like I was ahead of all of them! Carnegie Mellon now touts it's Entertainment Technology Center, and proudly proclaims how they're considered the Harvard of Game Development Programs, and they've even had me back to speak on a few occasions about my latest game. They've come a long way ;)

"Why make a game for an audience of 10 million when you can publish it on Sony's platform to an audience of 50 mil?"

Because I love making games? :) What you said applies to the corporations, but not to the enthusiast. Reminds me of OSS, kind of.

A Tale in the Desert (I'm not associated)

We all know that our favorite republic, which we like to call a democracy, is overall the best system yet to be implemented. But is it the absolute best? Does it give too much power to the rich? Would it work better if corporations had not been granted personhood? What if employment was abolished and every citizen earned his living as though he were running his own business with the product being his own labor or creative ideas?

As MMORPG's get more complex and people's participation in the virtual world becomes ubiqitous, these types of questions can be answered. Look at A Tale in the Desert as an example of something moving in that direction but also try to imagine what will be in another ten years.

A Tale in the Desert. This is why I should stick to programming, not marketing.

I run an MMO; we charge $13.95/month. Here are the costs:

$0.74 Credit card company
$0.90 Bandwidth
$0.38 Hardware, assuming 2-year replacement

With only 2000 subscribers, we're not yet at the point where we need to have paid GMs or customer support staff. However, we're close, and that's where the real costs come in. Right now, half of my time is spent on support. I work 80 hours/week, and am probably 2x as efficient at support as a non-developer would be. As we grow, we probably need a $30k/yr cost-to-employ person per 1000 players, so add to the above:

$2.50 Customer Support

So that's $4.52/month. I've heard that most of the big comapnies spend a bit more than that ($6-$8 total).
The problem with including many months of gameplay with a retail purchase is that a publisher/developer sees just a fraction of the retail price - the store and distributer take a big bite.
I know that Blizzard includes online play with their titles. Does anyone know whether you can summon someone if you, for instance, lose an item?

ATITD had thousands of players over three beta periods, with several communities and fansites already up and running, and they're now planning to publish and release it themselves. I think this game is going to be the first test of whether independent developers can survive in a scene that's more full of multi million dollar, hollywood-scale games than ever before.

They don't have a big budget, major investors or even a confirmed publisher, so they've modified open source programs like Cal3D and written their own scripting language for the game. They currently have something like 10,000 beta testers and the game is looking more promising than most of the other MMORPGs in the current and near-future market. All it takes is a good and well thought-through idea; if it appeals to people, that's all that's needed to create a successful game other than commitment.

Not true. We developed A Tale in the Desert, an MMORPG with a team of 3 full time employees, and a half dozen unpaid art interns. We've been been front page news on all the major game sites, and several print magazines.

Ask anyone that has played the game how it compares with EQ, DAOC, UO, etc.

From: Pub-Enforcement [enforcement@ebay.com]
Dear Domain Name Registrant:

It recently has come to our attention that you have registered a domain name that mimics the famous eBay name and trademark. As you are likely aware, the coined term "eBay" is one of the most famous names on the Internet. eBay owns several registrations for the eBay trademark in the United States and internationally. Accordingly, eBay enjoys broad trademark rights in its name. For your information, in a decision by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), a third party trademark application to register the trademark "ebaysecurities" was denied due to the USPTO recognizing the eBay trademark as a famous trademark, and thus entitled to broad protection. We are concerned that your domain name infringes and/or dilutes the famous eBay trademark. Infringement occurs when a third party's use a company's trademark (or a confusingly similar variation thereof) is likely to confuse consumers as to the affiliation, sponsorship or endorsement of the third party's services. Trademark dilution occurs when a third party's use of a variation of a company's trademark is likely to lessen the distinctiveness of the company's famous trademark. In this case, your use of the suffix "bay" in your domain name is likely to lessen the distinctiveness of the famous eBay brand. "eBay" is an arbitrary and fanciful trademark; neither "eBay" nor "Bay" describe online trading or e-commerce in any way. Therefore, it is likely that you chose your domain name to evoke eBay's famous brand. We take these matters quite seriously. As you may know, we settled a dispute similar to this one against a company using the name www.bidbay.com . BidBay has agreed to change its domain name, company name, and to pay eBay an undisclosed sum of money. Attached for your information is a news account of the settlement.

More information on trademark law may be found at http://www.fplc.edu/tfield/aVoid.htm. Federal and state laws, including the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999 () provide for serious penalties (up to $100,000) against persons who, without authorization, use, sell, or offer for sale a domain name that infringes or dilutes another's trademark. Infringers who have been notified of such infringing activity, but do not cease their infringements, may also be considered "willful" and could be subject to additional money damages and liability for attorney's fees. Having received this e-mail, you are on such notice. Trademark protection is very important to eBay. In addition to the Bidbay.com case, we have filed several successful federal court actions against cybersquatters. We have also filed more than six proceedings before the United Nation's World Intellectual Property Organization's arbitration panel; all cases order the transfer of the domain names at issue to eBay.

While eBay respects your right of expression and your desire to conduct business on the World Wide Web, eBay must enforce its own rights in order to protect its valuable and famous name. We appreciate that you may have registered the above-mentioned domain with the best of intentions and without full knowledge of the law in this area. Nonetheless, under the circumstances, we must insist that you stop using the domain name, do not sell, transfer or offer to sell the domain name to any other person, and simply let the domain name registration expire. Please confirm by replying to this email that you will comply as requested. Thank you for your anticipated cooperation.
Edith
eBay Legal Department

As far as I can tell, this is a FORM LETTER, triggered a scan of new domain registrations. Anyone got a similar one?

So what was the site? It was a fan-site for A Tale in the Desert, called www.egyptbay.com.

p.s. A tale in the desert is in open beta - check it out - VERY cool.

I'm the designer of A Tale in the Desert - sounds like what you're looking for has lots in common with our game. Our game in fact has no combat, but it is very much a MMORPG.

The world consists of multiple planes. Planes are disjoint areas.
Each plane consists of multiple layers.
- All planes have a "surface" layer that describes the terrain visuals.
- Almost all planes have an elevation layer of signed shorts. For our 3D client we use 1/20" increments with 0 considered sea level.
- Planes can have any number of additional layers, some of which are kept secret. Planes can be used to model underground minerals, pollution levels, walkability flag, etc.

When rendering tiles, you probably should render the intersections of 4-tiles, rather than independantly rendering each tile. That way you can define border tiles, corner tiles, etc., without building explicit grass-meets-path kind of tiles. Look carefully at the paths on "Oasis Island" in the screenshots sections of http://www.ataleinthedesert.com - they are all made of square tiles, but have a fairly gentle look.

Elevation maps don't compress well, making for long downloads in online games. Make these coarser, and use bezier splines when it's time to render.

To draw 1024x1024 tiles you'll need a LOD algorithm. Take a look at the screenshots with mountains in the distance - notice how they are a bit angular. We use a ROAM-like algorithm (easy to find online), but with geomorphing (again easy to look up).

Hope this gets you started.

Yerrrrs. Are you taking onboard that a MUD (replace with your favourite buzzword acronym) is defined by its community? EverQuest have gone psychotic with dictating how people are expected to play EQ - who you can play as, how you should play, what you can say. They're like the worst, most pig ignorant, egotistic GM you ever tabletopped with. I'd hate to see Star Wars go that way too.

Fair point there. I was talking about Lucas's policy in general. I really haven't read much on the subject, but the challenge of defining a play experience in an MMORPG is awesome and I'm sure good feedback is essential. Of course, the structure and degree of that feedback is the question. There are interesting ideas out there like A Tale in the Desert, but who knows if they'll work out. Anyway, EQ's strange restrictions on naming etc. seem pretty silly to me, primarily because the time wasted imposing them could be spent on more useful pursuits.