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The Laws of Online World Design

Posted by Zonk on from the make-sure-they-have-ground dept.

Next Gen has an article up republishing Raph Koster's seminal laws of Online World Design. The piece is one of the basic texts used to think about the way to put a MMOG together. From the article: "Design Rules - The secrets to a really long-lived, goal-oriented, online game of wide appeal : have multiple paths of advancement (individual features are nice, but making them ladders is better), make it easy to switch between paths of advancement (ideally, without having to start over), make sure the milestones in the path of advancement are clear and visible and significant (having 600 meaningless milestones doesn't help), ideally, make your game not have a sense of running out of significant milestones (try to make your ladder not feel finite) "

2 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Guild Wars rant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Cost me fifty damn dollars, mofo, which is how much EB is selling it for. So you'd better look up the word "free" before you go spouting it and all that crap. The only damn good game that is free is Nethack and it kind of sucks.

  2. From the source by Anm · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is a reprint of something that has been around forever. Here is the original posting at Raph's website.

    Anm