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Second Life was the one MMO, however crude, that you could have sex in.

Unless you are a furry.

Furcadia had a PC and iPhone version of the game available ages ago, so no, not new.

No, if you have to verify with a credit card the age limits work quite well

This is what Furcadia does, and it scares me that it actually works.

You can make a lot of money from furries. Take an established section of the web market, add the word "fur" to it, and sell it at an inflated price and you're into money.

Ask http://www.furcadia.com/ or http://www.furbid.ws/

I get the impression this survey had a self-selected sample. In any case, their results show that most of the players participating came from Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot, and that around 90% of the respondents are male. Online gamers as a whole (some 48% of Internet users play at least casual games, according to Gametrust) are around half female, and I'm sure even on more "hardcore" games a much higher percentage are female. On Furcadia more than half of the players are female. I also noticed a heavy bias towards email and web forums for communication outside the game, in preference over instant messengers and voice chat. I think the general population tends more towards IM and voice chat than this sample does - I know our players love both of those.

I know the interface may be a little hard to grasp for children, but with a little /.-style experimentation (totally kid-safe, of course) and a patient teacher who has looked it over you could try Furcadia. The style resembles stripped-down Sims (but with anthros, I mean c'mon, kids love animals =P), but every player can create a customized multiuser-accessible "Dream" as well as collect items, quest, and socialize within a G-to-PG rated world.

Actually, there are some independent online RPGs out there. We just don't get the press coverage of the larger games. We also don't have as high of production values (I.E., our art isn't as pretty as the big-name games).

My own game, Meridian 59 is a typical fantasy RPG, with a heavier focus on player vs. player combat and socialization. It has a much more interesting character advancement system which is much faster than most other games.

If you like crafting or an Egyptian setting, you might try A Tale In The Desert.

If you like puzzles and pirates, try out Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates.

Want to express yourself creatively while playing an anthropomorphic animal? Furcadia might be your game.

It's kinda like movies. Sure you can go see the latest action flick starring The Rock(tm) advertised heavily on TV and magazines, or you could spend a bit of time reasearching for yourself and find a great indie movie. The indie MMORPGs are out there, you just gotta look a bit harder.

Having the creators try to keep up with the voracious demand for content of hundreds of thousands of players is tough, though. It's not as easy to get away with "everyone goes through the same quests" as in a single player game, because the players are interacting and communicating more, and thus telling each other the quickest ways to get through everything. So ideally you would have more content the more players you got. But the creator-centric model doesn't scale so easily. You could try to hire twice as many level designers, artists, etc. if your user-base doubles, but it's tough to keep up if your game is successful, managing a large team gets increasingly tricky, etc.

Player-created content scales great. If your game goes from 10,000 players to 100,000, the demand for variety of content may be larger, but your number of potential creators has gone up by a factor of ten, so you're covered. The vast majority of the interesting content in Furcadia is user-created maps, art, and scripts for various quests, games, etc. And we have players that are still playing and highly interested and addicted since they started in 1996. Player created content IS a viable approach to making an MMORPG.

Because let's not miss an important fact here - socializing is the number one leisure activity humans want. If your hardcore gamers focus on levelling to the point where they're not fun to chat with, or will only chat about in-game things, that'll turn the average person off to socializing in that environment. Reality check on the numbers - last time I checked (years ago, admittedly), people spent around $10 billion each on electronic games and on movies a year, around $20 billion on radio and newspapers, around $40 billion on television... And something like $160 billion on talking to each other on the telephone.

Socializing is what people want most, and the first online game to get it right will make big money. Voice chat, video chat, build in messaging systems competitive with the best pagers and email programs, put in spectator modes, an attention economy, etc. etc. If you're working on a game to compete with mine though, please pretend you didn't hear any of that. *wink*

Our bandwidth was provided free at first, by Mplayer and then by Playnet. (Thanks, guys!) Now we pay something like $650 a month for a game server, mail server, and web server plus enough bandwidth to service all our current players, with really good private peering to keep netlag minimal. It's great how much bandwidth prices have come down since we started in 1996! If we had to, we could take day jobs again as we did our first few years, just pay that monthly hosting bill, and keep the game open. And the game's been a lot of fun for a lot of people, led to marriages, all the usual things online games have (and a few unusual things, since we let players upload their own art, maps, code their own scripts to make quests, games, etc.)

But... While you might think someone with a background like that would be on the "they charge too much, burn the witches!" side of the debate... I've worked in the game industry since 1982, and I know a lot of the people that work on the big expensive hit MMORPGs. And those costs aren't made up. Yes, my partners and I, and the game we made, serve as living proof that you can do SOMETHING on a pretty fair sized scale for almost no money. But you do get a lot of things on a game that charges $10-$13 or more a month. Millions of dollars worth of professional quality art and animation, for one thing. And paid customer service and tech support staff, something we mostly use unpaid volunteers for.

Ultimately, the biggest operational cost on most of the commercial online games today is customer service, eclipsing even the number two cost, bandwidth. And I think most people would agree that the average level of customer service quality today is not satisfactory to players, and would not be considered acceptable in most other industries that maintain customer service phonelines and such. (Which is almost all of them). Rather than argue that they exaggerate their costs, one COULD make an argument that they need to be spending even more, until they are providing satisfactory service!

Current games spend half or more of their revenues on customer service staff and bandwidth (and a few other operational expenses). Whether they'll eat into the profits more, raise prices, get consumers used to the idea of never expecting higher quality support, or keep outsourcing more and more of the support work to India, that remains to be seen.

I kind of like our all-volunteer model for the enthusiasm it brings, but the big companies would never take a legal risk like that, after seeing the lawsuits against AOL and Ultima Online. A lawsuit like that could crush a company as small as ours just from the legal fees, even if we won - but it's in the nature of tiny companies to take the big risks, right?

Repository could very well be /.ed at the moment. I downloaded the source about a week ago, even tested it by running the Furcadia client (I've got a few buddies I RP with over there) and it seems to work just fine. Admittedly, needs aren't as great as others', but I can say that with the tiny bit of testing I did, this version is faster than prior versions.

Looks like you need a healthy dose of this to keep your bestial urges channelled to something safe, you raving pervert!

The game Furcadia also predates the 1996 date of the patent.