The Barbarians At The MMOG Gates

simoniker writes "Areae president Raph Koster is perhaps best known as a designer of Ultima Online and the previous CCO of Sony Online Entertainment, and in an in-depth Gamasutra interview, he discusses his views on 'game grammar', the uniting of MMOs and online worlds, and the software patent problem. In particular, he's been talking about the 'barbarians at the gates' for hardcore MMO makers: 'Even the creation of the MUD in the first place was that. It was the Internet-based reaction to the stuff that had existed on the microcomputers and the Plato network and all of that. All of a sudden, "Oh, wait! We can put a text MUD on Arpanet!" And it was like, "Whoa!" and it spread like wildfire, and all of a sudden, all of that other stuff went away. So it's really possible for that stuff to be happening now with microtransactions, with portals versus traditional publishers, with digital distribution publishers versus traditional publishers, and with MMOs from MTV versus MMOs from Sony or EA or NCSoft.'"

Comments

Re:Meh.

[vux984]

Max level in a week yes, but it's designed to take weeks/months for them to actually beat the end game content, usually by forcing them to gather together in groups of 25-50 and repeat the same element over and over again until the group collectively has enough keys or loot ("power ups") to proceed to the next stage.

Everquest expansions routinely took months to out and out beat, and most players -never- got see most of the end game content.

Re:No, I don't like paying $5 for coffee.

[Chibi Merrow]

Starbucks is expensive

So get coffee at Dunkin' Donuts.

so are monthly fees for games

Since reactivating my WoW account I've spent significantly less purchasing new games. At the end of the day it's saved me money.

I like the gp, prefer to invest my scarce resources in more rewarding pursuits.

I wouldn't call GTA rewarding, personally. There are some games out there that are considered "art" and really should be experienced for the experience's sake, but most of them aren't from this generation anyway...

Re:Meh.

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Buying a game card is the same as buying a subscription for one month and then canceling (except that you can buy a game card with cash) - you purchase the right to play for x number of days, and that right expires when those days are up, regardless of whether you've actually played the game or not. What the parent is suggesting is a system under which you would pay (let us arbitrarily say) $.75 for each day on which you log in to play the game. Thus, at the end of a 30-day billing cycle, you might pay $7.50, or you might pay $1.50, depending on how active your account has been.

Re:Why Offline will matter

[Chibi Merrow]

If you travel with a group, you'd better keep up with them, because if you get to be more than 2-3 levels behind them, you can't do the same quests as they do. So they either redo the easy quests with you, or leave you behind.

A well designed game doesn't have this problem...

No one will delete my lvl 60 party for nonpayment of fees.

I've never had a character deleted for nonpayment of fees. My WoW account was inactive for a year and everything was there when I got back. A friend of mine reactivated my old EQ account last year and everything was still there (amazingly).

I could set the game aside for 6 months, never touch it (say if I get busy, or if I simply *don't want to play it*) and everything will still be exactly as I left it. I'm not going to lose out just because I didn't have enough time to play this month.

I haven't had the time to play WoW for more than an hour or two a week for the past three weeks as I've been working on my Master's Thesis. When I do get back to the game, my character will not have gotten any less useful. But then again, PvP has always been a great thing for people like me with limited schedules...