How responsable would you be for the content stored on your Nano Data Center... I can see tons and tons of lawsuits.
Another thought, how much redundancy would be required to protect the data should Joe-Six-Pack accidently wipe his data. Or get his set top infected while surfing for porn.
This could be a good way to distribute malware, being that we'd (presumably) have access to someone else's data within our datacenter. What would stop me from replacing the content of the datacenter side of my box. Physical access is a bad idea.
There is also a privacy issue. If we know what is on our datacenter, we could track incoming requests and build a database of users/ips that like whatever content we are serving.
I've always liked the micropay system, I think it certainly gives the players options. Maybe a hybrid system would be in order, ie: you play for free and just access the free content, or you pay a tiered monthly fee and the money you pay can be used to redeem items, or in a "Cash Store" And players could certainly pay the minimum monthly fee and still toss more cash in to get stuff they don't have enough points for yet. That would take some of the "Ohh, i want to buy this or that, but I just can't justify paying a dollar for it." They are paying for access to the items and then getting to use that money again. And if someone wanted to buy lots and lots of cash items they could pay more individually or up their monthly fee. Parents could even set up ingame allowances with this system...
You sparked some good food for thought. I thank you!
the next thing you know, the RIAA is successfully proving in court that ripping a CD is copyright infringement, because format-shifting is legal, sure, but a computer putting the bits into RAM in order to format-shift them is illegal.
Unless you used a random bit generator to randomly come to the exact bit configuration of the file, how you would check it against the file to see if you got it right or not without loading it into ram may be another story...
I disagree with your statement that bot players make the game more prosperous, though I would like to hear your reasoning. I hate that you were marked troll, but I have no mod points to add.
I have always been curious about the motivations behind botters, what aspects of botting do you enjoy? What about botting helps the economy or other players?
From my personal experience: a friend of mine stole my account and used it to try glide. I had not played WOW for over 2 years at this point... But I recieved an email informing me that my account was to be banned for botting. Through some investigation I found that it was a friend I had fallen out of touch with who knew some of my older passwords. I still haven't spoken with him, but I do wonder what makes a person load up a botting program knowing there is a decent chance they will lose anything they gain.
You have some very good points. The market for single player is MUCH larger as you say, but single player games don't necessarily attract the same people as multiplayer. I personally am not really interested in single player games, with some exceptions. I like the living economy, the in-game competition, the exploration of higher level/dangerous places. So while I agree that the final product would be alot more refined if the studio worked on a single player game first, that doesn't guarantee the game will be a huge success. Take Final Fantasy XI for example. Good game, targeted at consoles. Did wonderfully in Japan, and only so-so in the US despite the HUGE FF following. The game was too geared toward japanese gamers. Very few armor sets, very similar re-colored monsters, but damn did I love their fishing system.
My ideal solution would be similar to what Age Of Conan did where you have the multi-player aspect of the game, then you have the single player story mode where you advance through the initial story at night, alone. Though I would have liked to see some different single player instances that could be played offline. There are alot of ways to do it, but I agree with your basic premise. I think that a single player game that had Massive Multiplayer as a bonus feature (perhaps for a subscription) would be the ideal solution. Or even co-op network multiplayer.
The problem is, there are too many technical hurdles preventing this, such as offline trainers, and botting programs that could level your player offline and ruin the online aspect. You could check for abnormal changes in the character with some sort of daily attribute increase limit so players could only improve so much per day of game play, which I think is a decent solution. It would make real life sense. You can only get so much stronger given a day of working out, so why wouldn't the same apply for in-game attribute changes. Again, I would move myself away from a leveling system and go with something more akin to a stats system where players can get stronger by doing strength type actions and faster by doing thing that require speed etc. So the attributes level as opposed to the player character. I might even throw in attribute stagnation and decay assuming they stop working one of their attributes, so there is a need to keep adventuring to continue being an excellent adventurer.
As I have said, there are many solutions. And I agree that a single player offline option will probably be a must to increase the market share, and frankly I think this is something that should have been thought of by now. My feeling is that it is harder to make the offline content than the copy paste online quest content, so it is never seen as a viable option. Players expect MUCH more from offline games.
Stats and loot are mechanics that are important for a lot of players of these games.
I agree with the majority of what you have to say, especially the above. Players will always want stats and loot, and I would never take those away.
If you try really hard to minimize risk and only look out for rewards you'll soon find everything you do becomes a job.
This is where I see it differently. I don't have to try hard to minimize risk, the game dynamics already do that for me. EQ1 had the best death system so far. It was hard, you had to run naked back through mobs to get your corpse. Trains were nightmares. But it was SO much fun. Now in pretty much every MMO you die, respawn and rebuff, maybe repair then run back in. Hell in Age of Conan I use it as a cheap method of travel. There is NO risk to speak of, thus no reason to be careful, thus eventually every game eventually becomes a job despite the actions of the player. I want a system with item decay and death penalties. With no death penalty there is no reason to avoid death except for the minor inconvience of traveling back to where you were, or paying a tiny amount of xp debt. They don't need to debilitate players on death, but they do need to give more incentive to stay alive.
I may be jaded, but I have been playing these games since beta of eq1 and before in the MUDs and BBS games, I see so much potential in the MMO genre, but the field is difficult to get into, and harder to actually get your own design published, though that is my ultimate goal. Eventually, we may all be bitching about how much my game is old and tired and we can't wait till the next @title -killer hits the market. But until that day I'll play what is available and yearn for change.
The only thing I got from that was "slave drone troll" So I'll assume you are speaking in trollish, and a dialect I'm not familar with. At any rate, I was wondering if you would be so kind as to give me your bank account number, as I have a large sum of money that I need to secure for this prince friend of mine...
My mileage most certainly varies. While I agree with you on most of you points about those that play MMOs, I disagree that WOW has the market "Locked Up." It may currently hold the most players, but not because it is the best, it is just the most polished and well known. Most MMOs get crappy releases and thus suffer the early abandonment of a large portion of their users. The worst of it is that every game is essentially a graphically updated and stylized Everquest 1 clone. The main gameplay style has not changed in the slightest:
1. Click monster
2. press random skill
3. gain experience.
4. ???
5. Profit (sorry obligatory)
As long as MMOs use a class, level and HP based system they will all fall into this design. Its easy, they keep copy pasting the basic design of everquest because it is easy from a design point of view and it is easy to bring a gamer in from another MMO because they have no new learning curve apart from what are the new buttons I need to click until the new monsters are dead.
What is needed is innovation. Some games have done so in the past and succeeded, Starwars Galaxies introduced a tree based class system allowing for multi-classing and giving the player lots of freedom. Tabula Rosa brought with it first person style combat (But massive bugs.) Age of Conan has directional combat that in theory is great, but in implementation ends up being a more strategic button press system.
What the next MMO needs to get right, is to really spend the time it takes to polish the game as if it were a single player console game they couldn't update. Companies tend to treat MMOs as if they can release unfinished beta products (or alpha sometimes) and use the patcher to slowly bring their product up to par for release. This would not be acceptable in any other field, and shouldn't be acceptable here.
Aside from the fundamental release perspective, the game systems are stagnant and need revamped desperately. But this faces several problems. The basic model of a MMO is to keep players in game as long as possible and subscribed as long as possible. Thus the level system. It is essentially a gridlock with the players getting stronger, and then moving on to monsters that match them in level, thus negating any real strength increase, so all advancement is merely imagined. There is no benefit in killing the weaker monsters, and the new ones are killed the same way as the old just requiring more time to defeat (due to increased HP.)
There are many fixes, but they all require a complete restructuring of the basic MMO design, thus adding a learning curve to getting players to switch, and ultimately increasing your chance for failure. But there is NO other choice. These games will have to adapt or die. Players are leaving them all for exactly the reasons I've outlined. The market may be growing now, but unless the games do more to keep players than just introducing new zones and upping the level cap their playerbase will burn out and have no desire to adopt the latest and greatest MMO.
So long rant at an end, I disagree that they need to stop making MMOs, but I instead think they need to START making MMOs differently.
I got one this morning titled: "Grow a Kangaroo in two weeks!"
I was almost intrigued enough to click on it, but thankfully gmail quoted the message inside : "Tom Cruse crashes a helicopter over the Pacific Ocean, body not yet found..."
While I admit the possibility of both being true excited me extremely, I figure the probability of both having my own kangaroo and Tom Cruse dying within the same day/email to be a little outside the realm of believability.
*sigh* well there is still the chance that my letter to Tom trying convincing him to "liberate" a kangaroo from the zoo will yield one success, and should he fail I will have an excuse for the other...
The Freedom Law: The likelihood of someone mentioning Ron Paul is directly proportional to the length of any discussion involving freedom, fascism or politicians.
It occurs to me that, should we live to be 1000, we would probably need to consider how willing we are to pay for a murderer to serve 953 years on tax payer dollars. Do you believe that extending our lifespan will allow for greater rehabilitation of prisoners or an increase in the severity of punishment? (ie rampant death penalty)
Slashdot Mirror
Invite received! thank you sir! I shall continue spreading the G+ love
If anyone has a spare, invite Azzuth (at) gmail . I'll spread the love to others in this /. thread when I get invites :) /future thanks
(Yeah, I'm aware static is background radiation leftover from the bigbang, the above is mostly a joke--mostly.)
Which is why it would be so brilliant to hide their messages in the static. You would have to know what to look for to even know there is a message.
Isn't it 2008 right now?
Yeah, but there are those pesky things called months.
I've often been told that if I had enough money that I was just one white cat of a James Bond super villain
--
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
if you asked Bruce Schneier to decript this, he'd crush your skull with his laugh.
He decripted it for me, and I still have my skull. On the other hand, he did take my soul. :( not really a fair trade in retrospect.
In short, soviet russia is a joke.
How responsable would you be for the content stored on your Nano Data Center... I can see tons and tons of lawsuits.
Another thought, how much redundancy would be required to protect the data should Joe-Six-Pack accidently wipe his data. Or get his set top infected while surfing for porn.
This could be a good way to distribute malware, being that we'd (presumably) have access to someone else's data within our datacenter. What would stop me from replacing the content of the datacenter side of my box. Physical access is a bad idea.
There is also a privacy issue. If we know what is on our datacenter, we could track incoming requests and build a database of users/ips that like whatever content we are serving.
I've always liked the micropay system, I think it certainly gives the players options. Maybe a hybrid system would be in order, ie: you play for free and just access the free content, or you pay a tiered monthly fee and the money you pay can be used to redeem items, or in a "Cash Store" And players could certainly pay the minimum monthly fee and still toss more cash in to get stuff they don't have enough points for yet. That would take some of the "Ohh, i want to buy this or that, but I just can't justify paying a dollar for it." They are paying for access to the items and then getting to use that money again. And if someone wanted to buy lots and lots of cash items they could pay more individually or up their monthly fee. Parents could even set up ingame allowances with this system...
You sparked some good food for thought. I thank you!
In soviet russia, mirror takes pictures of you!
the next thing you know, the RIAA is successfully proving in court that ripping a CD is copyright infringement, because format-shifting is legal, sure, but a computer putting the bits into RAM in order to format-shift them is illegal.
Unless you used a random bit generator to randomly come to the exact bit configuration of the file, how you would check it against the file to see if you got it right or not without loading it into ram may be another story...
Nothing is removed for data either (unless you're using read-once memory (tm the CIA))
mod me as offtopic as you like, but I found it funny...
I disagree with your statement that bot players make the game more prosperous, though I would like to hear your reasoning. I hate that you were marked troll, but I have no mod points to add.
I have always been curious about the motivations behind botters, what aspects of botting do you enjoy? What about botting helps the economy or other players?
From my personal experience: a friend of mine stole my account and used it to try glide. I had not played WOW for over 2 years at this point... But I recieved an email informing me that my account was to be banned for botting. Through some investigation I found that it was a friend I had fallen out of touch with who knew some of my older passwords. I still haven't spoken with him, but I do wonder what makes a person load up a botting program knowing there is a decent chance they will lose anything they gain.
You have some very good points. The market for single player is MUCH larger as you say, but single player games don't necessarily attract the same people as multiplayer. I personally am not really interested in single player games, with some exceptions. I like the living economy, the in-game competition, the exploration of higher level/dangerous places. So while I agree that the final product would be alot more refined if the studio worked on a single player game first, that doesn't guarantee the game will be a huge success. Take Final Fantasy XI for example. Good game, targeted at consoles. Did wonderfully in Japan, and only so-so in the US despite the HUGE FF following. The game was too geared toward japanese gamers. Very few armor sets, very similar re-colored monsters, but damn did I love their fishing system.
My ideal solution would be similar to what Age Of Conan did where you have the multi-player aspect of the game, then you have the single player story mode where you advance through the initial story at night, alone. Though I would have liked to see some different single player instances that could be played offline. There are alot of ways to do it, but I agree with your basic premise. I think that a single player game that had Massive Multiplayer as a bonus feature (perhaps for a subscription) would be the ideal solution. Or even co-op network multiplayer.
The problem is, there are too many technical hurdles preventing this, such as offline trainers, and botting programs that could level your player offline and ruin the online aspect. You could check for abnormal changes in the character with some sort of daily attribute increase limit so players could only improve so much per day of game play, which I think is a decent solution. It would make real life sense. You can only get so much stronger given a day of working out, so why wouldn't the same apply for in-game attribute changes. Again, I would move myself away from a leveling system and go with something more akin to a stats system where players can get stronger by doing strength type actions and faster by doing thing that require speed etc. So the attributes level as opposed to the player character. I might even throw in attribute stagnation and decay assuming they stop working one of their attributes, so there is a need to keep adventuring to continue being an excellent adventurer.
As I have said, there are many solutions. And I agree that a single player offline option will probably be a must to increase the market share, and frankly I think this is something that should have been thought of by now. My feeling is that it is harder to make the offline content than the copy paste online quest content, so it is never seen as a viable option. Players expect MUCH more from offline games.
Stats and loot are mechanics that are important for a lot of players of these games.
I agree with the majority of what you have to say, especially the above. Players will always want stats and loot, and I would never take those away.
If you try really hard to minimize risk and only look out for rewards you'll soon find everything you do becomes a job.
This is where I see it differently. I don't have to try hard to minimize risk, the game dynamics already do that for me. EQ1 had the best death system so far. It was hard, you had to run naked back through mobs to get your corpse. Trains were nightmares. But it was SO much fun. Now in pretty much every MMO you die, respawn and rebuff, maybe repair then run back in. Hell in Age of Conan I use it as a cheap method of travel. There is NO risk to speak of, thus no reason to be careful, thus eventually every game eventually becomes a job despite the actions of the player. I want a system with item decay and death penalties. With no death penalty there is no reason to avoid death except for the minor inconvience of traveling back to where you were, or paying a tiny amount of xp debt. They don't need to debilitate players on death, but they do need to give more incentive to stay alive.
I may be jaded, but I have been playing these games since beta of eq1 and before in the MUDs and BBS games, I see so much potential in the MMO genre, but the field is difficult to get into, and harder to actually get your own design published, though that is my ultimate goal. Eventually, we may all be bitching about how much my game is old and tired and we can't wait till the next @title -killer hits the market. But until that day I'll play what is available and yearn for change.
The only thing I got from that was "slave drone troll" So I'll assume you are speaking in trollish, and a dialect I'm not familar with. At any rate, I was wondering if you would be so kind as to give me your bank account number, as I have a large sum of money that I need to secure for this prince friend of mine...
Well at least you won't care that your system got rooted...
My mileage most certainly varies. While I agree with you on most of you points about those that play MMOs, I disagree that WOW has the market "Locked Up." It may currently hold the most players, but not because it is the best, it is just the most polished and well known. Most MMOs get crappy releases and thus suffer the early abandonment of a large portion of their users. The worst of it is that every game is essentially a graphically updated and stylized Everquest 1 clone. The main gameplay style has not changed in the slightest:
1. Click monster
2. press random skill
3. gain experience.
4. ???
5. Profit (sorry obligatory)
As long as MMOs use a class, level and HP based system they will all fall into this design. Its easy, they keep copy pasting the basic design of everquest because it is easy from a design point of view and it is easy to bring a gamer in from another MMO because they have no new learning curve apart from what are the new buttons I need to click until the new monsters are dead.
What is needed is innovation. Some games have done so in the past and succeeded, Starwars Galaxies introduced a tree based class system allowing for multi-classing and giving the player lots of freedom. Tabula Rosa brought with it first person style combat (But massive bugs.) Age of Conan has directional combat that in theory is great, but in implementation ends up being a more strategic button press system.
What the next MMO needs to get right, is to really spend the time it takes to polish the game as if it were a single player console game they couldn't update. Companies tend to treat MMOs as if they can release unfinished beta products (or alpha sometimes) and use the patcher to slowly bring their product up to par for release. This would not be acceptable in any other field, and shouldn't be acceptable here.
Aside from the fundamental release perspective, the game systems are stagnant and need revamped desperately. But this faces several problems. The basic model of a MMO is to keep players in game as long as possible and subscribed as long as possible. Thus the level system. It is essentially a gridlock with the players getting stronger, and then moving on to monsters that match them in level, thus negating any real strength increase, so all advancement is merely imagined. There is no benefit in killing the weaker monsters, and the new ones are killed the same way as the old just requiring more time to defeat (due to increased HP.)
There are many fixes, but they all require a complete restructuring of the basic MMO design, thus adding a learning curve to getting players to switch, and ultimately increasing your chance for failure. But there is NO other choice. These games will have to adapt or die. Players are leaving them all for exactly the reasons I've outlined. The market may be growing now, but unless the games do more to keep players than just introducing new zones and upping the level cap their playerbase will burn out and have no desire to adopt the latest and greatest MMO.
So long rant at an end, I disagree that they need to stop making MMOs, but I instead think they need to START making MMOs differently.
I got one this morning titled: "Grow a Kangaroo in two weeks!"
I was almost intrigued enough to click on it, but thankfully gmail quoted the message inside : "Tom Cruse crashes a helicopter over the Pacific Ocean, body not yet found..."
While I admit the possibility of both being true excited me extremely, I figure the probability of both having my own kangaroo and Tom Cruse dying within the same day/email to be a little outside the realm of believability.
*sigh* well there is still the chance that my letter to Tom trying convincing him to "liberate" a kangaroo from the zoo will yield one success, and should he fail I will have an excuse for the other...
Hopefully it wiped out their computers. Should keep them off the forums long enough for some intelligence to seep back into online discussions...
gitmo i think...
The Freedom Law: The likelihood of someone mentioning Ron Paul is directly proportional to the length of any discussion involving freedom, fascism or politicians.
It occurs to me that, should we live to be 1000, we would probably need to consider how willing we are to pay for a murderer to serve 953 years on tax payer dollars. Do you believe that extending our lifespan will allow for greater rehabilitation of prisoners or an increase in the severity of punishment? (ie rampant death penalty)
If we live for 1000 years, what kind of changes would have to be made to saftey regulations to prevent early accidental deaths?
I'm gonna hold out on buying it till they release it in book 2.0 format. My new eyes 2.0 aren't backwards compatable.