Brand Loyalty (was Re: [MUD-Dev] Requirements for MM (wasComp lexities of MMOG Servers))

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

From: "Koster, Raph" <rkoster at soe.sony.com>

> Do you mean Sims Online? If you do, it has tremendous treadmills
> that are mandatory before you can do hardly anything creative. You
> have to earn sick amounts of money and have to macro your skills
> for hours to do anything creative.

For the record, my wife and I were among the first wave of beta
testers. We lasted about two days before deciding the game was
simply not fun. We did not (and will not) buy or subscribe to TSO.

We own two copies of the Sims and every Sims expansion pack. We buy
them on the day of release. That's an investment of over $500 in
this game. If *we* don't like the online version, then something is
very seriously *wrong* with the online version.

Personally, I found it annoying that there was so little I could do
up front, and became frustrated enough to quit in a matter of
hours. My wife lasted longer, finding a houseful of roommates and
encouraging me to rejoin the game so we could interact there. Midway
through the weekend, she reported that the only way to earn any
money was to spend hours and hours online, and she still couldn't do
anything fun. She hasn't been back on since.

The situation you describe is, in our opinion, an excellent
representation of how to make a game that sucks the donkey's balls
hard enough to make his ears twitch.


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