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A Gaming God For Dollars A Day
Wired is reporting on the new "Gamepal" service, which offers up the chance to MMOG players of renting a character in an online world for only a few dollars a day. From the article: "GamePal customers pay a $300 deposit, $150 for the first month and $130 for each subsequent month for access to their choice of 50 accounts (available initially) for 14 popular MMOs, including EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes and Ultima Online. Newcomers to these games who aren't sure where they want to devote their time are in luck: GamePal allows them to try out what they want."
I always get a kick out of people being shocked over the financial gain in MMORPG commodities. The sale of in-game gold, powerleveling, and now character renting are more common then they ever were. This is a disaster for the MMORPG community.
I am an MMORPG vet. I spent many good hours of my youth, and now my adulthood, on UO, DAOC, EQ, EQ2, WoW, and the like. While the gaming experiences were different, a common element arises in this form of gameplay. You can ALWAYS tell the difference between a player at the maximum level who earned it, and a player who just picked up the account the other day on Ebay or through other forms of sale. You can always tell the difference between the person who quested for their items long and hard at the expense potentially of his/her sanity and the person who doesn't. It is that simple.
I could proceed to flame here. These players are less skilled, they decentralize the community attachment at the higher echelons of the game. They have no right to do this.
But they do.
Most of these account sales, sadly, come with the original product CDs. They are legal sales. Most of them carry the disclaimers the EULAs make them ("we own the account, not you. You are paying for the usage, not the ownership"). There is no law broken in the sales if done properly.
Do they eviscerate a previously elite community where you knew that every person earned their keep? Oh yes. Do they have a right to? Oh yes. People who don't know how to play have a right to play alongside the most skilled of players. We don't give people an IQ test to vote in democratic governments, do we?
If we can't apply it to the most basic of principles, we cannot apply it to an MMORPG.
I don't like it, you don't like it, but they have a right.
The Crimson Dragon
Oh please dear god don't let this include FFXI (at work, can't check TFA). Nothing fills me with more terror than the idea of complete newbies running around with high level jobs, even if only on a temporary basis.
This isn't just an elitist thing; it's more of an "I don't like dying" thing. Levelling at any point beyond level 18 or so (and preferrably a long time before then) in FFXI requires that you join a party, usually of 6 people. Roles in these parties are pretty defined and a good party needs all of its members to be on the ball. Depending on his role in the party, a single incomptetent can do anything from dramatically reducing the rate you get xp at to causing the death of the entire party.
Most jobs grow in complexity as you level up and gain new abilities. For example, as a Paladin, you can get away at first with just tanking by using provoke. As you get into the 25-30 level range, it becomes more and more importand to keep hate by using cure spells and abilities such as shield bash. Ideally, you should know how to use Cover (a notoriously fiddly and tricky, but incredibly useful ability) by the time you hit 40 and certainly by the time you are 50. In a level 60 party, a paladin who didn't know how to do any of this stuff would get his party killed... fast. By cutting out the learning curve on a job, you are putting yourself and others at risk of unnecessary deaths and xp loss.
What exactly is the deposit for? Can you damage the character in such a way that there needs to be monetary compensation? ... *Hovers his mouse over the "Delete Character" button* ...
Random and weird software I've written.
"Until you remove crashes and lag and disconnects, you can't have perma-death in a game designed to take as long to build a character in like an MMORPG."
"Until you remove crashes and lag and disconnects, you can't have perma-death in a game designed to take as long to build a character in like an MMORPG."
I think that is the entire point. You CAN have perma death. Armageddon MUD has no holds bar perma death and does it very well. Further, it is REAL perma death. No ressurecting, no gods, nothing. Get stabbed to death and you die. Period.
The difference between a perma death game like Armageddon MUD and WoW is night and day. The two are built upon an entirely different style of game play.
First, numbers generally trumps skill. Five complete n00bs can kill almost anyone. Even the best warriors when faced with five opponents will only be good enough to escape, but never win. It is a scaling system, so there is still advantage to getting good. So, a great warrior can take on one n00b and kill him within seconds. Two n00bs also present no problem. Three n00bs and he probably come out badly wounded but alive. Four complete n00bs vs a skilled warrior is an even match, and five tips the scales. These does a couple of things. It prevents players with way too much time on their hands from becoming immortal. It also makes even the most green newbie worth something. Just having an extra guy with a sword at your back, even if he only knows which end to hold it by, is worthwhile. This makes it so that newbies are valuable, sought after, and quickly integrated into in game organizations. This also prevents more powerful players from owning the game simply due to the amount of time they spend in game.
Second, the skill system is a level less skill system. Skill is increased by failing. Further, the rate at which you can increase your skills is capped off. You could set up a macro to do a skill all day long, but you would find that you don't advance any faster then anyone else. Play time still is going to effect how powerful you get, but much less so. Your ability to survive plays a much more important role, because once you are dead, you are dead. So, a complete newbie that avoids death for a year will be more powerful then a veteran who has played for 10 years but has just died and had to start a new character.
A side effect of such a skill system is that it encourages more sane behavior when it comes to improving upon yourself. If you decided you wanted to be a kick ass warrior, what would you do? Go out into the streets and pick fights or join the army? This skill system encourages the same sort of rational. You could wander out side of the protection of the city and go NPC farming, but you would get just as good if you join the local band of mercenaries and sparred for a few minutes every couple of hours.
Third, the game is brutally harsh. There are no n00b zones. There are in fact no 'zones' at all in the traditional sense. Places are not separated by skill levels. The desert just outside of the main city in the game has things that anyone with a rock can kill, and it has things that take a small mercenary company to take down. There is no such thing as safe place to hunt. There is further compounded by the fact that the game is open PvP. Leave the city and you put yourself at risk. Some people get good at living in the danger, but most people just die. This has the neat effect of concentrating the population into cities. The cities themselves are fully developed. Some areas are tightly controlled and any sort of unlawful activity is met with deadly force, while other areas are slums and have no (official) police protection at all. It forces people to travel in convoys and groups between cities. It actually creates a real environment for trade because it is so difficult and expensive to move between cities due to the high danger. Some people get rich off trade, others die trying.
I have rambled on long enough. The major poi