On Rewarding Socialization In MMORPGs

Thanks to Skotos.net for their article discussing how social interaction affects gameplay in MMO titles. The piece suggests: "That the majority of MMORPGs, MUDs, and other multiplayer games ultimately support achiever players over socializers, or even killers, I think begins to outline how poorly we understand - and support - true social interactions in today's multiplayer games." It goes on to discuss freeform socialization ("We slap a chatline into a game. Then we spend as much time making it look nice"), competitive socialization ("the richest form of interaction possible in multiplayer games, yet ironically it's more often been seen as a problem than as a potential virtue"), and co-operative socialization ("One of the few games that has really tried to push this envelope is Asheron's Call with its ideas for feudal structures.")

Comments

Re:tsarkon reports 9 step greased yoda doll

[orthogonal]

I take it you realise that your post would have been banned if such a filter were active? ;)

A funny observation, but in reality perhaps, and perhaps not. The Bayesian filter works on an accumulation of tokens; a brief quote, or even several as in my comment, will not necessarily rise to the spam threshold (which threshold of course, can be arbitrarily set).

When I first installed a Bayesian filter for my email, I tested it by sending it spam-like email (containing words like "mortgage", "lolitas", "penis", etc.) but from my own address. The email was tagged at 5% spam, well under the (SpamBayes default) 15% threshold for "suspicious", and 18 times lower than the "definitely spam" threshold of 90%. This was because the filter had been trained that anything from my own address wasn't spam.