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I do most of the design and programming on A Tale in the Desert and Dragon's Tale and I've seldom/never needed to do an integral or solve a system of differential equations. Understanding those concepts does frequently influence game design, however, so having taken those courses was important, at least for the kind of games I do. (Giving specific examples would require that you are familiar with gameplay for each of those games, but feel free to contact me directly if examples would be helpful.)

But on to specific branches of math: You'll certainly use linear algebra doing 3D programming, and IIRC that's considered "beyond" calculus. (If you're using OGRE or Unity 3D, at least at the API level then I'm surprised you haven't run into this.) Applied Math, which is often a college freshman course for a CS decree is crucial to all sorts of programming, especially games. Combinatorics is critical for game design, though if you're just planning to be a programmer, not so much. Numerical Methods will teach you exactly when and why rounding errors to happen, how they can compound each other, and in general help you write squeeky-clean math code. The game I'm working on now is a gambling MMORPG - I probably don't even have to say how important statistics is, if this sort of thing is in your future :)

Notice how different each of the math subjects above is? A lot of this comes down to learning how to learn, and that's the one thing that in my experience differentiated high school academics from college.

Bitcoin hasn't gone away. It may not be an investment to hoard at the moment, but as a currency it's functioning beautifully. I run Dragon's Tale, a casino MMORPG hybrid, which uses Bitcoins exclusively. Our new-players-per-week initially peaked right at the peak of the Bitcoin bubble (around 120 new players per week for a couple weeks), dropped to about 20/week, and has been growing for the last few months. Currently we get around 60 new players per week. Revenue from Dragon's Tale's hasn't passed our other game, A Tale in the Desert yet, but on several recent weeks it's come close.

Players love Bitcoin because deposits *and withdrawals* are instant, unlike all other online casinos. I know that some of my players also play poker at Seals With Clubs, a Bitcoin-only poker site. They may have a win at Dragon's Tale, shoot the money over to Seals, shoot their winnings back to DT, or into their Silk Road account to buy some goodies, or into their desktop wallet. If Bitcoin were never to go beyond gambling, it will be a success: it allows all Bitcoin-based casinos to function as one huge meta-casino.

Another way to reward players is to let them feel that they're really having an impact in changing their world -- that they've modified something that others will experience in a durable manner.

This is one thing that always brings me back to A Tale In The Desert. It's not the prettiest game in the world, and can definitely be awkward at times, but it's unique in it's mutability. For those unfamiliar, every aspect of the game is democratic. Don't like something? Then write a law and attempt to convince others to pass it. For example: a resource that is needed for certain recipes is cactus sap. To get this cactus sap you have to cut the cactus and wait for it to come out after a few minutes. Common courtesy is that, when done, you cut the cactus for the next person to make their time shorter. Someone decided there ought to be a law that when you collect sap, you auto cut the cactus. This saves you clicks (1 click to cut and collect vs. 2) and it means there will always be sap for the next person. Everyone loved the idea, it was passed into law, and the developer implemented it. It's a beautiful system.

Here you go.

FWIW, my company has released (public Alpha) a game that revolves entirely around Bitcoins. It's a cross between a casino and an MMORPG - the first of it's kind, from what I can tell. Dragon's Tale is filled with novel games of luck and skill. Some skill-based games have a >100% EV for the smartest players.

It's built on the same platform as A Tale in the Desert, so native Linux, OSX, and Windows clients are available.

'If you imagine Civilization where you invent your stuff or build new stuff, imagine playing one of those characters on the ground doing that. And being able to do something minute in your world and see that impact in the major world,' Eskil explains, when asked what his game will be like. 'I want to scare people in a direction that is different from this sort of "me-centric" style of games. It feels that pretty much all games are going into that Diablo direction of collecting and building up my characters, and it's all very egocentric about creating your own powerful character,'

Obviously he hasn't played A Tale in the Desert.

Not at all. I never said to destroy the world and leave. You have to stay in the world and live with the consequences.

This is not, though, a feature of "games". If it's not fun, you can choose to leave. So you can't force anyone to "live with the consequences". In fact, you've created an environment that would be toxic to new players.

Actually been there, done that. The sandbox MMORPG game A Tale In The Desert had a disease ravage the land at one point. Many people worked on a cure. The cure was slow in coming, though, and many many people simply stopped playing. The accomplishment from making the cure wasn't worth the pain.

To kype a quote, sometimes the only way to win is not to play.

I think the main problem is that everyone seems to set out to "beat WoW". Why? Why do you need to beat it? An MMO can be successful, profitable without being the MOST popular or the MOST profitable. Look at LOTRO or EVE for example - they're not eating into WoW's playerbase, but they're (presumably) still doing well.

I'm sure there are probably more examples of MMOs which may not be on everybody's lips, but still manage to turn a profit. Does anybody have data on small-time MMO projects like Vendetta or A Tale in the Desert? I've played Vendetta briefly though I have no real handle on their subscriber base.

That said however, both Vendetta and A Tale in the Desert "break the formula" so to speak, I'd imagine if they were small time WoW clones they would simply have sank without trace. In summary then: Break the mould, don't worry about "beating wow", just worry about making your own game a success (and that doesn't mean loads of money necessarily).

A Tale in the Desert definitely falls into the category of one of those fringe games. I played it for a few months back around the second Telling, and really enjoyed it. Unfortunately that particular telling progressed too slowly, and since then the population has dropped down too much for the game to have the same impact it once did.

What made WoW special was having such a huge population early on--the population itself, not what drew it in to begin with. I personally enjoyed doing 40-man raids and other activities in large groups, and it definitely gave the game a more epic feel. Unfortunately, between the move away from 40-man content and server transfers decimating my server's population, it was enough to make give up years of invested time and effort in the game.

I even did Warhammer for a while, hoping to re-live that first epic year or two of WoW, but between poor implementation of various aspects of the game plus server transfers destroying entire server populations, Mythic lost yet another customer.

Right now, I still play EVE. It seems to give me most of what I'm looking for. Deep down I still want to see the next WoW, the next truly epic high-population fantasy MMO, but I have no idea what (or when) that might be.

I run an online game and "chargebacks" are really annoying. How it works is that if someone calls their credit card company and says "I don't recognize this charge", Visa immediately removes the charge and debits our account the $13.95 monthly fee, plus a $25 "chargeback fee". We then have the opportunity to provide documentation that they really did sign up for the game.

If Visa then determines that the charge was legitimate, we get the $13.95 back (but not the $25.) If they determine that the charge was not legitimate, then we get neither back, and are charged an additional $25.

The worst that's happened is that someone used a bunch of stolen credit cards to create dozens of accounts over several months, always being careful to use open proxy servers. So we ended up with $1800 in chargebacks, and no way to stop them!

What we ended up doing was explaining the situation to everyone in the community, and when this guy contacted any of his in-game friends ("hey it's me, just had to create this new character") they would tell us and we would shut the account down right away and reverse any charges, but what a PITA!

Eventually this guy moved on, but we never did find him. Some social engineering indicated that he was from playing from internet cafes in Romania, but that's as far as we got.

I see you've never played A Tale in the Desert (Atitd.com) it has repeated 'Tales' which have a beginning, middle and a definitive end.

It happens all the time. A Tale in the Desert has already closed up the world and turned off the lights three times and is on its fourth "telling". Each time the game has been started with a fixed goal which the players have worked to and completed.

Simpler MMO strategy games like Travian have similar life cycles and have closed up hundreds of worlds only to restart them clean a few days later.

The MMO called A Tale in the Desert fits the bill very well. The level of competition varies, but it is an incredibly social game, very player driven, and requires a lot of cooperation to be successful. There is no violence of any sort, at least not when I was playing. It's the perfect environment for those people that have the urge to let their inner trade-skiller out.

http://www.atitd.com/

Go check out A Tale in the Desert. Yes, it even has a linux client.

http://www.atitd.com/

(Damn slashdot javascript ate my comment)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_in_the_Desert

It's non-combat, based around social interaction, development and construction. Very tightly knit community. I'd really give it a try, monthly fee but first 24 hours of play are free.

http://www.atitd.com/

A Tale in the Desert:

http://www.atitd.com/

is one good example of a game designed around cooperative and meaningful action. Players design whole villages and environments on their own based on an open world with a complicated ecosystem and meaningful quests.

The players can achieve high and unique status in a complex political and questing system - all generated by player action within a loose and changable framework. You work your way "up" both by slogging through menial tasks and interacting creatively and socially with other players.

The only "problem" is that the game is not action/conflict oriented. This sort of game is not of primary interest to the online gaming market that is more geared toward completely escaping reality into violent fantasy rather than semi-realistic cooperative fantasy.

The inability to win, beat the game, or just finish is the reason MMOs never interested me.

MMOs never define a "win" condition. They leave that up to you the player.

There are some MMOs that have a definitive Win/Lose condition inherent to the game. See this game for more details. At the time of writing the game is in the Endgame stage (where the game can be won or lost). It's not a perfect game by any means, but is *very* different to any other MMO that I've ever played.

I designed (and run) A Tale in the Desert, one of the games on the list. About 3.1% of paid players currently use Linux. Also, 7.3% use OSX, and the rest use Windows.

Of all trial accounts, 7.3% of Linux users go on to pay for at least one month of the game. Of OSX users, it's 6.9%, and of Windows users it's 11.8%.

For some reason the Linux number has dropped significantly over the years (used to be around 10% IIRC), though the other two numbers have remained about the same.

I'm aware of the evolution MUDs have taken over the years. Unfortunately the creative space seems to have been largely usurped since the release of Meridian 59, Ultima Online, and Everquest. No longer are there hordes of new and unsuspecting college kids eagerly waiting to play test your new idea. New (and old) MUDs and their ilk seem to only attract the detritus of the internet these days, (very) young kids, those too cheap to afford the pay for play content, and drifters just sampling the waters before moving on to move evolved game space.

So what's left are the few MUDs who have survived over the years, such as BatMUD which have become very cool, but also have a small and deeply entrenched player base. This makes breaking into such games rather difficult for new players. And this is possibly a fault with the game model itself. When you allow players to greatly control the game world, they seem to become very possessive of the game space they control which leads to a Darwinian battle where only the most die-hard and fanatical groups rise to the top.

I've seen a few game designs over the years which suggest newer and better things are on the horizon, but none of the ones I've been interested in have evolved into a playable state, or else have grown in directions other than I was looking for. So if anyone knows of games with dynamic/evolving content engines, I'd be greatly interested.

Ok, big name companies/games like that -would- make a difference, but they have to be sure they'll make a profit before they do anything beyond proof of concept. How much money would have to go into Spore to make a production port for the iPhone? From what I know of ports (I helped do some minor alpha/beta testing of the Mac port of A Tale in the Desert http://atitd.com/), there's a lot involved in even a simple project with limited hardware like the iPhone.

Apple had troubles getting big name games/companies to make Mac ports, so I'm hesitant to think they'll all jump on board for iPhone ports when the market there is smaller and the chance for profit slimmer.

I think you may have seen a little bit too much World of Warcraft and not nearly enough of, say, A Tale In The Desert. Online RPGs aren't just about killing thousands of orcs and then stacking up their bodies and building a little fort out of them. Sometimes you can, you know, actually interact with other people in a non-hacking-and-slashing way.

There's one privacy policy I've seen that's even odder than that. "If you ever get spam becuase of entering your email address here, you may call my personal cell phone ..." A tale in the desert

• The WoW disease killed. WoW has an "easy resurrection" system, so it didn't cost players more than a few minutes of inconvenience.
• The cause was immediately known, and the cure (death) while inconvenient, was also immediately known
• Detecting a carrier was easy.
• Being cured of the disease (dying) took little play time.

• The disease debilitated, eventually forcing a disconnect for a period of time (a coma, as it were).
• The cause had to be discovered by the player community. And even after theories were proven, there were still some cases that could not easily be explained.
• Much like real life, carriers often didn't know they had it until signs manifested... too late for those around them
• Discovering a cure was a separate (community) event, requiring much player time and involvement. Actually getting cured took a non-trivial amount of time and resources on the part of the "sick" player. ... and the character could get reinfected a short period after taking the cure. (A permanent cure was eventually discovered, which took MORE resources...)

http://www.atitd.com/

The only thing new here is that they are doing this to try to convince players they aren't crooked because they are too incompetant to run their own game. Where as atitd had player governments as part of the game from the start.

Sounds like Anarchy Online is what you are looking for. Free client download and free to play. If you want to explore/play their expansion areas, then you'll need to pay. But the original area is large enough to keep one's interest for 30 or 40 levels. Even after that there is still enough content to keep one interested but the expansion areas offer better equipment&xp. The game is well established and well populated. Cedega does support playing AO in Linux.

Another free to play game is Last Chaos. The only time you have to pony up some cash is if you want to buy something from their item mall like an xp potion(+30% xp). The game is fantasy based, so it might not be your cup of tea. It is an interesting game, the devs have done some unique things. Example would be skill points, these are earned along with xp but at an inverse... high xp, low sp/low xp, high sp. They also have events every weekends; friday happy hour(random bonus stuff like double xp during happy hour) and sunday tea time(again random bonus stuff). Last Chaos is playable in Wine.

For a purely cooperative game, you might check out A Tale in the Desert. There is no combat in the game. It does offer a a native linux client. It has been a while since I played this one.

There are a wide variety of mmorpg out there, some just take a bit of effort to find. Maybe start your search at mmorpg.com.

Endings are important in games, I think. The only way to have a meaningful journey is to have a starting point and an ending point, and perhaps a little motivation to get things done. The biggest problem I have with 'mainstream' MMOs is the fact that there is no end. The game will continue indefinately, and to me, that cheapens the experience. Given a long enough timeline, everone can do everything; none of your accomplishments are actually meaningful in the context of the game.

The MMO I play currently breaks that paradigm. A Tale In The Desert http://atitd.com/ by a small company called eGenesis (its been mentioned on /. before, I think) has a limited timeline of about 2-2.5 years, depending on both the players' and the developers' input. It does not have a defined ending, but the players can either win or lose. It gives you a limited timeframe to work on your personal goals. It gives meaning to your actions within the context of the game - not necessarily will everybody be able to accomplish what you just did. Its possible that some of your accomplishments may be entirely unique - nobody else in the game managed to do what you did. This, to me, holds a lot more appeal than being player #1,343,346 to kill whatever uberboss in whatever top level instance.

D'oh, I should have also mentioned A Tale in the Desert, although it's completely monster free... or it was when they were still on version 2.

Think of a real-time Risk-type game with at least a few thousand players. Your alliance manages to take over a territory after a long enduring battle against the territory's previous rule. Anyone "living" (not everyone needs to be involved militarily) now falls under your jurisdiction and is subject to laws your alliance has explicitly written. However in a seperate area of your empire there are players who prefer a different form of government than yours. They manage to stage an uprising while your alliance has neglected to keep military presence in that area...

The NDC is long expired on this, so I guess it's OK to talk about it.

Before A Tale in the Desert, we proposed an episodic MMORPG to Disney based on A Bug's Life. We built a playable (2D) prototype that was a lot of fun. Characters from the movie were NPCs - for instance, Flick would give you "blueprints" for crazy contraptions, and you'd have to scavenge and make all the parts for each one.

You could find grain and plant it to grow wheat shoots to use as rubber-bands. You could climb the tree and toss down acorns to other players. They could show them to Flick who would suggest an invention to pry the nut from the cap, and then the cap could be used with glue that came from sap as part of a gear for other contraptions.

Ultimately you'd build a little ant-sized sailboat/raft to get yourself and trhe others off the island, and that would lead to episode 2. IIRC, the content that we had could be played through in an hour or two by a team of 3-5 people.

Unfortunately the project never made it further than the prototype - I think this was all in 1999. But I still think that A Bug's Life is *the* Disney property that needs an MMO.

Another game kind of like this is A Tale in the Desert. However it has pretty much no combat at all, instead the goal is to complete progressively more complex "tests" in different disciplines, such as Architecture or Leadership. The interesting thing is that the more advanced tests often require groups of people to work together, forcing social interaction (and increasing complexity; see also: drama). Players can also create new laws in-game, which is kind of interesting.

"Blizzard has written new storylines before. Last winter, it challenged players to team up and fuel a worldwide war effort. As a payoff, it unlocked new territory. This was a good example of letting the users drive a story, but Warcraft needs more of them. New wars should break out, cities should rise and fall, and all hell should break loose at least once a month--and the players should be the ones to make it happen. After all, in a world that never changes, you can never make your mark."

There ARE mmorpgs that have non-static worlds that the players feel like they can change. (Because they can)

Might I reccomend some, such as a tale in the desert or possibly eve...

If you are a crafter at heart, maybe check out http://www.atitd.com/ or even (shudders) Second life.

Join us, and freedom from realtime treadmilling will be yours...

http://www.eve-online.com/

A Tale in the Desert does this exactly. Players can pass laws that ban a specific player, or players. They can empower certain players with the ability to ban, jail, or creatively restrict others.

In ATITD 2 (or maybe it was 1), a high profile player liked to mentor new players. But, he was terrible at it - turned off new players by the dozens (or more). Veteran players passed a law limiting his access to new players via the chat, mentorship, and guild systems. Then, they taught him how to be an effective mentor, and finally repealed the law.

The parent post is right. Indie games often do compete with other games, at least in the mind of the consumer. You may not create your little war game to compete with other war games on the market, but you can be sure that the war game fanatic is going to be comparing your game to every other game he has seen.

The trick is to have a unique selling point that draws people. For a "casual" game, that usually means having a more streamlined experience and a lower price point. If a person can jump into a game and buy it for $20, that's worth a lot more to most people than if the game has a multi-hour tutorial and costs me $60.

For other types of games it's harder. My own game, Meridian 59 is a small Player vs. Player (PvP) focused game. Definitely not for everyone, and it tends to cater to a hard-core audience that has enjoyed the game over the decade it has been running. The game isn't graphically impressive, so it runs on older computers. The game focuses more on skill-based PvP rather than level-based monster grinding. It couldn't be more different than World of Warcraft (WoW) unless we took out combat.

People still compare Meridian 59 to WoW, though.

WoW is bigger. WoW is prettier. WoW has more classes. WoW has better loot. The $10.95 per month for Meridian 59 is "almost as much" as the $14.95 per month for WoW. WoW has to be a better game because more people play it.

Now, I don't develop the game to compete with WoW. I'm mostly happy keeping the game running for the people that truly enjoy the unique aspects of the game. But, even if I'm not competing with WoW people are still going to compare my game to it despite what I think.

I've posted some other thoughts my game development blog.

Some thoughts from another indie developer,

There is also OSX client, check it out at http://atitd.com/

so much about misleading...

We almost had a major publisher for A Tale in the Desert. They projected around 30,000 subscribers. Now, 3 years after release, the actual amount of money we put in our pockets each month is just a bit less with ~1300 subscribers than we would have made with a large publisher at 30,000.

And, no bureaucracy, no suits second-guessing me, and I can try any crazy thing in the game that I want. My advice: If you can self-publish, do it. If you can't, find a way that you can ;)

Well, we could always play A tale in the desert. This telling, you can't even kill yourself! :) (And it's pretty fun to play)

Well, I'm off finishing my beer brewing :)

Just to put it in perspective, I play a MMORPG (sigh) that has about 1300 players. Total. It's quite alive, though there is only one server. I don't think the developers are strapped for cash either. The GMs are volunteers from the among the players I think... in return for GMing, they get snarky name signs. So it is certainly possible to run a MMORPG with 10000 players.

A tale in the desert in case anyone wants to check it out. Free clients, free trial period, $14 (I think) a month thereafter, linux, mac and windows supported. The graphics stink, but the community is delightful, and the crafting system(s) are something else. No violence, though.If you do decide to try it out, give me a chat if I'm online... I'm Cappu, expert cook, blacksmith and other stuff as time permits :)

Ok, this one doesn't match your 'no fees' criteria, but it really is an easy game to get into in short bouts, its great for puzzle solving and it runs in cycles, so it doesnt last forever... http://game1.atitd.com/main.html It's called A Tale In The Desert. From my experience with it, the game is pure community. There is no killing stuff to get ahead, there is no level grinding. Here's a link to a review. http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/taleinthedesert/rev iew.html Hope this helps.

All these games are (WoW, DaOC, STG, ect..) are big statistical simulations where the players do nothing but tweak numbers (player stats).

Agreed, the levelling up is usually just as exciting as filling in numbers in a spreadsheet, but there are some MMORPGs that try to do something new. You are even stuck on thinking that it has to be about combat and killing stuff. These people try to do something even more innovative, which might be why they haven't become as popular:

Puzzle Pirates, the first mmoarrrrrpg. You simulate combat by solving puzzles. Different players that crew the ship perform different puzzles, the better they do the more tokens the captain gets (movement, cannon shots, ship health..) to use when the sea battle commences.

A Tale in the Desert, a game that has NO combat. You "win" over other players by performing artworks, building pyramids, getting people to vote for you or performing cermonies and rituals, like for instance
"Have 20 charactars stand still and quietly observe the sunrise. If one speaks or moves away the ritual is destroyed."
or "Bury a large bag of money in the desert. Tell 10 other players where it is. If the bag remains for a week undisturbed you have passed the test of friendship. The other players get nothing for participating in the test. Unless they cheat, in which case they get the money."

You can get laws voted through that changes the whole game, and so on.

Both games are characterised by having more mature and social players than the hack and slash games, and a much larger percentage of female players.

I haven't played them myself though more than the demos. I stay away from most games and especially online games after shaking off a one year Everquest addiction 5 years ago.

Try them! Both have demos available, ATITD have a Linux client, PP both Linux and Mac (runs on all platforms that have Java actually).

The article talks about the ranking system that I invented and implemented in A Tale in the Desert for use in the Discipline of Conflict. Great to see the coverage, but unfortunately the algorithm didn't work well in practice, and we've since abandoned it.

The problem was that it took too long to converge. Of course all the parameters can be adjusted for faster convergence, but then it became too easy to metagame! I concluded that any continuous system that collapses the result to a small amount of data (like a rank (ELO), or a rank+confidence (TrueSkill) or a bitvector (eGenesis)) after a match would suffer from this problem.

"A Tale in the Desert II" replaced the eGenesis Ranking System with an asynchronous king-of-the-hill method. You start at rank 1, and must play someone at rank 1. It's asynchronous because you don't hold anyone up by not playing - the system never assigns a match. Instead, you just walk up to another rank 1 player and challenge them. They must agree to the match. The winner becomes rank 2, and the loser is "out". If you're out, you can reset back to rank 1, but only once/week. You can metagame your way through a few levels, but it takes an exponential number of co-conspirators to attain a given level. (I've simplified the system a bit. The full system is documented here.)

Unfortunately, the Conflict Discipline was only popular with a very small number of players, and it's being replaced in ATITD 3.

Note: A related problem is Judging Systems, where players rate in-game works of art. We've tried a number of algorithms there, and just recently have come up with one that

I think you missed the point. He's saying that it should be possible to group with higher level characters (who don't have their stats adjusted) for the purpose of adventuring, not leveling.

True, I was just nitpicking that CoH did it first.

There is one game where high level characters can group with low level characters and neither party gets their stats adjusted... ToonTown. The game doesn't really have levels, its more skills based. But there aren't any restrictions on who can group with who. One does need to complete some "quests" to gain access to certain areas, tho.

The game isn't bad and it entertained me for a while. It is geared more towards a gamer parent and his/her child but it still well done.

In all the games today the focus is generally to aquire levels and to aquire loot (not including pvp related stuff). We have enough of those games. Wouldn't it be great to have a game where those goals were secondary to simply having fun and adventuring in the old fashion PnP style? There are some people who try to play WoW that way, but the experience is not very rewarding because all the content is designed for the other type of player; the one who just wants loot and xp.

"Adventuring" can be a vague word, "fun" even more so. And that's the rub when creating a MMORPG. Creating a "fun adventure" that someone will be willing to pay a monthly subscription for it. Its easier to point out problems, than find solutions. ;)

For me adventuring in a MMORPG generally means exploring a new region/dungeon. Usually killing stuff along the way but sometimes the adventure is just reaching a "high level" town without getting killed along the way. Or maybe getting an ingredient needed for crafting. Those tend to be solo adventures but sometimes I can recuit help to kill the monsters.

WoW's world is much too small for anything other than xp grinding. The original Asheron's Call had a much bigger world and provided more than few exploration adventures for me & friends. Anarchy Online's world is pretty big too but doesn't random abandoned castles(filled with mobs to kill) that AC has. AO does have guided tours of areas, which are kinda neat. No level restrictions and you get some back story from a live human(the guide).

Regardless of the world's size, eventually one runs out of places to explore.... at least until an expansion pack is released. But basically the virtual world is finite in size. AO does have dynamically created dungeons but they don't really count, its just a random generated floor plan.

Not sure a MMORPG will ever really capture the fun and adventuring in the old fashion PnP style simply because the environment is too different. e.g. there is always a new area to explore. I agree that NWN(or Torque) are the best bet because the content is player created.

You might want to check out A Tale in the Desert. They offer a free trial and both windows & linux clients.

It is a completely different kind of MMORPG. It has a really strong and involved community. For example they(the players) are able to pass laws that affect the virtual world. There is no combat; just exploring, building stuff and completing trials. And for a twist it has an end. I played a bit in the "First Telling", while the eye candy isn't much it is an interesting game.

In the end the real trick is finding like-minded adventurers and being able to all get online at the same time. After that its just making the most of what that virtual world has to offer. If that world doesn't have much to offer, then move on there's a ton of mmorpgs out there.

I played/sampled the D&D beta and was completely unimpressed. And I've played a wide variety of mmorpg and some real B grade ones at that. To me it came off as a cross of AC2 & Guild Wars. Guild Wars is better.

There is so many MMORPGs in the market very different from what you described. A Tale in The Desert http://www.atitd.com/ for example, or EVE-Online http://www.eve-online.com/

Sounds a lot like A Tale in the Desert

It's a game that based solely around crafting where you strive to create civilation. There is no combat but that doesn't mean you can't resources and trading to limit other players and gain more power in the world.

Two online games that stick out for me are Legacy Online and A Tale In the Desert.

Legacy Online is no longer in existence, but basically imagine the flipside to SimCity. You are a company that builds the housing in the residential zoned areas, builds the stores in the commercial areas, and builds the factories to supply your stores in industrial areas. It was very interesting, and if I were teaching an economics class, playing this game would have been required material. It made you understand a lot of market concepts, such as your company actually wanting the minimum wage to be higher because it gave your customers more cash to spend at your stores. You couldn't just raise wages on your own, because the effect of just one company was next to nothing, so it just raised your costs. Very interesting stuff.

ATITD is a non-combat MMORPG. If you play games to "pwnxxorz n00bz," it may or may not be for you. But if you prefer PvE, it has a free trial and it's worth a try. You only need to play it for a few hours to realize that the crafting systems you herald from WoW or other MMORPGs are pure crap with no thought put into them.

One request that has often been asked but hardly answered is the free-game-with-subscription model

You mean like A tale in the desert?

Free trial, free download, runs on 3 platforms (mac, linux-x32, win32) and very fun game. The graphics are unstunning, but good enough. The community is great, and there is some great game play. No sword, no axes and no violence, though.

Try "A Tale in the Desert" at http://www.atitd.com/