Slashdot Mirror
MMOGs Shift Gears, Online Crime Up
Next Generation has a pair of articles about the Massive scene today. One is an interview with NCSoft's Ryan Seabury about the company's shift away from the fantasy genre, and the other a short piece stating that in-game crime is on the rise in Japan as the popularity of MMOs continues to rise. From the NCSoft article: "There's a distinct lack of an online home for the wider action gaming crowd in the MMOG arena today. Although we've seen a general trend towards more action and more mainstream gaming in MMOs, still nothing is in the same league as your typical team based FPS style gameplay. We want to provide that home to the masses of action gamers out there, looking for over-the-top action. Our core gameplay mechanic and pace attracts the action gamer, but we subversively immerse them deeper into the world as they play, via the fiction, the item hunting, the crafting, the vehicle customization, the arenas, and so on."
What Halo2 can't do is the element that turns an FPS from running around and shooting at things into a war: Larger objectives. The maps are always the same, the two teams are trying to do similiar things, or one team is always trying to do something and the other is always trying to stop them.
With an (Ideal) MMOFPS you might have a single unified map tens or even hundreds of miles across, with some sort of 'teleporter' system that can move you close to your team's front lines in a few moments. From there, you can use all the now-standard tools (up through possibly even paratrooper-dropping) to gain a new objective. Furthermore, the objective may not always be obvious. If lines of support and supply are implemented, you might try to cut these off to adversely affect respawning. You might try pinning down players with critical equipment from the opposing side to make their assault collapse. Or maybe you just grab a gun and shoot at anything and everything that moves, hey, that's fun too.
The point is, a well-done MMOFPS can bring a degree of depth that CTF and Deathmatch games can't match.
Well, ok, I'll give WoW that. It does have farming, though you probably realize that you don't really have to compete with that. The only way you'd end up in direct competition with those is if you too planned to sell gold on eBay, but I'm thinking you didn't.
What you accused it of, however is rampant cheating, cracking, and scamming. I can tell you firsthand that it's not the case.
The quip about having access to lots of CD keys, I'm not even sure what to make of it. They have access to the keys they bought, and that's that. Even if you told someone your CD key (but not many people are stupid enough to do that), once you've already used it to open an account, it's not usable again. So it would be of exactly zero use to anyone.
Look, I'm not saying you should play WoW or whatever. If it's not your favourite genre, fair enough, you're better off playing something else.
Noone's forcing you to play it, so you don't have to invent completely bogus problems to talk your way out. Just don't play it if you don't want to, and that's that.
Or to put it otherwise, no offense, but please stick to stuff you've actually played and problems you've actually experienced when you want to complain about something. You're so far off the mark, that it's like reading someone complaining about sniper-camping in Leisuresuit Larry, or about the selection of racing cars in Quake 3.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Actually, I'm not even playing WoW any more, but I find it surrealistic to basically extrapolate "WoW is a MMO, some other MMOs have been ruined by cheats and hacks, therefore WoW is ruined by cheats and hacks too." It's a textbook fallacy. It's as bogus as saying "Need For Soeed is a computer game, some computer games are FPS, therefore NFS is a FPS."
The thing about keyloggers again, you're extrapolating things you know from other games (e.g., FPS games where that CD key is your only identification) to something where that doesn't even work at all. It doesn't matter if you get my WoW key by trojans, keyloggers or I gave it to you, you just can't start another account with that key. Ever. Period.
As I've said, please complain about things you've actually experienced. This talking out the rear end based on assumptions and blanket extrapolations is getting tiresome.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
FTA: "Theft of online 'virtual' goods is on the rise in Japan, as the popularity of MMOGs increases."
Then the article goes on to describe a single incident as anecdotal evidence of this trend. Poor reporting, headline and teaser have nothing to do with article.
That said, the instance cited involves one player using another player's password. How did he get it?
If she gave him the password, then it does not excuse his behavior, but she messed up.
If he cracked her password, then that's a different story.
But really, online goods, if they have real-world value, need to be protected. Secure passwords, etc. Do you let your kids leave their YuGiOh cards unattended at the mall?
The answer, to me, is to not let your kids play games that you can't trust to protect your property.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai