[MUD-Dev] Star Wars Galaxies: 1 character per server

[Vincent Archer]

According to Dubious Advocate:

> The current crop of MMOGs have increasingly attempted to force
> co-dependence and social interaction.  "You SHALT play with others
> before Me!"  Their goal isn't the intangle of social evolution IRL
> - they simply want consumer retention through social factors
> supplementing addictive Pavlovian game mechanics.

Sounds like "current crop" = EQ for you. Which I wouldn't label as
current crop :)

Since EQ and his model of "people power scale linearly with level,
mob power scale exponentially" (not exactly true, but true enough),
MMOG have increasingly moved to a style where it's possible, but
"unrewarding" to play solo.

The best example of these is one of the latest MMOG, AC2. In AC2,
you do not even have the slightest need of placing yourself in a
position where you get interaction with other players. There is no
bank to go back to store lewt. There are no vendors to go back to
sell lewt and buy supplies. You can perfectly solo (even if it's
less profitable) 100% of the time.

In fact, AC2 might have gone a bit too far in that direction,
removing too many reasons to seek out people.

The problems of allowing solo gameplay is that it's easy to *reward*
solo gameplay instead of the reverse. If I play for N units of time
today, and the hassle of finding a group and dealing with the
constant coming and dropping of group members whose play schedule
aren't mine, and the play skill of random people in that group is
not compensated by the increased experience gotten by a group, then
it's better for me to play solo.

And lots of things contribute to said hassle.

  - Difficulty of finding a group with free spots

  - Group worthiness of your character

  - Difficulty of access to the group's location

  - Coordination of group activities

Allowing solo gameplay without thinking about these makes a game
that reward soloists.

E&B is a good example of things gone bad in that direction. They've
gone very far into heaping benefits of being in a group. All group
members contribute an intrinsic bonus to various aspects of the
group. You get 40% bonus to XP per additional group member, if
"within level range".

And then, no thought has been given to the points above.

Finding a group? There's not even a LFG (looking for group) flag.

E&B rewards you for 3 activities: trade, exploration/mining and
combat. For trade, having other people is a deterrent (you have to
wait for them, as they have a different speed from yours). For
exploration, you are useful only if you haven't been there before
and your worthiness evaporates after that. For mining, if you aren't
of the classes that can prospect, you're an xp drain, and if you
are, you exhaust the areas too quickly. For combat, each class has a
firing range they're best at, and by nature, if you're a close
combat class along with a long range class, then you might get lucky
to fire a couple times on the ennemy before it croaks, because your
partner already caused 85% of the damage before it got into your
range.

Etc.

--
	Vincent Archer			Email:	archer at frmug.org

All men are mortal.  Socrates was mortal.  Therefore, all men are Socrates.
							(Woody Allen)

_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev