Slashdot Mirror
Rethinking the MMOG
Gamasutra is running a piece right now called Rethinking the MMO. Game designer Neil Sorens takes issue with some of the consistent blights on the traditional Massive gaming experience, like the phenomenon of the 'ordinary' hero, and the extremely large time investment required to 'get anywhere'. Though he doesn't offer a lot in the way of concrete solutions to these issues, his appraisal of the genre is sure to spark a few conversations: "As long as developers and publishers do nothing but copy what is successful, they--and gamers--will continue to miss out on these games' staggeringly awesome potential. And as long as [MMOGs] are designed by and for stat geeks (whom I know and love and sometimes am) with little regard for traditional game design fundamentals, they will continue to waste that potential."
Apparently he's never played Test Drive Unlimited (an MMO Racer), Chromehounds (an MMO Mech game)... or read any previews for the upcoming Huxley (an MMO FPS).
Collector's Edition
5. What about griefing? There's always idiots that do that. How do we deal with them?
America's Army has the best solution to that - the in-game Army Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.. "If a player violates enough ROE he is transported to a virtual jail cell at Fort Leavenworth with nothing to do but clink against the bars, pondering his sins. As if to create remorse, one can view the tip of a sunset from the lone, high window the cell but only if one is standing on the toilet."
You haven't played in a while then as there have been changes to address travel time. Before the changes, there were work-arounds, though. If you sit at your keyboard and don't use autopilot, you can use WTZ (warp-to-zero) and it makes traveling very fast.... you can cover vast distances in 15 minutes (several systems a minute in anything but a capital ship). Before WTZ was put into the game, people had bookmarks that did the same thing.
If you were sitting around watching timers, you weren't playing the game. You may have had more fun exploring lowsec/zerosec space or investigated the alliances that, through game mechanics, actually control areas of space (and benefit from having that control), build their own space stations, and have epic wars with other player alliances.