[MUD-Dev] MMORPG Cancellations: The sky is falling?

[Oliver Smith]

The quoting makes this a little lengthy, sorry :)

Raph Koster:
> From Oliver Smith:

>> I doubt CoH will be a lasting success, but I hope it will be a
>> basis for a move away from the McQuaid/Koster concept of "the
>> customer wants to be beaten with a stick, needs to draw blood
>> before they can have fun".

> Er, I dare you to point out one single place where I have ever
> said that or anything even close to it. Given that most everything
> I have written on online games is visible via Google, you should
> be able to pin it down and call me on it if I have.

Sorry, it wasn't intended as a literal quotation, or intended as
attribution to yourself. More an expression of the general tendency
of leading developers towards greater control over and constraint of
the player's experience that I find somewhat akin to buying the
Hitchhiker's Guide DVD and finding it will only play me one episode
a week. (And I thought putting McQuaid/Koster together would be
indicative of my being vague :)

> "only give players one thing to do" is not the only answer to the
> problem.

...

> Right now, it's a popular design choice. Curiously, it is not a
> design choice that over 25 years, we ever saw the entire mud hobby
> choose to follow. I think asking why might be a good endeavor for
> the list.

I'm certainly not praising the single-thing-to-do aspect of
CoH. Rather I feel its merit is its approach to content delivery:
pro-actively delivering the player a consistent choice of content
through the contacts/missions system.

MMO subscribers have become more fickle in the last year or so, so
CoH's subscriptions and retentions indicate it is providing
something that some portion of the player-base see as missing, and
its my speculation that it is the regular diet of activity.

There are countless things to do in EQ, DAoC, SWG, etc, but it isn't
served up to you; more often than not it's a good google or two
away. And then you have to compete with 50 other parties who got the
same google result for an item that, if only you'd look, has a far
better substitute a mere 3 zones away!

A lot of the choice in CoH is smoke and mirrors - the sub-classes
are much of a muchness, and there is only one type of mission (beat
stuff up).

Compare wtih E&B which had significantly more content and choice,
but was far more linear in its serving of it.

In a second post in the same thread:

> I think saying that "nothing on the market has depth" implies
> you've got a different definition of depth than most do. Can you
> clarify what you mean by that?

I consider 'depth' to be a measure of personal involvement and
direction with the events unfolding around the player; divergence
from merely linear, boolean quests and character progressions.

While, obviously, all games have some degree of depth, I think far
too often it is simple breadth or linearity.

It appears to have been the demon of many a design
team. Unfortunately it is either inflexible or content
intense. Inflexible is interpreted by players as grind, and content
intense tends to lead to bean counting or worse, lack of diversity
(one quest with 24 possible outcomes vs 8 quests with 2 possible
outcomes each).

I don't think there has been a lack of effort; but I don't think
depth is something that is ready to be defended in MMOs yet instead
of championed.

Perhaps my definition is the wrong definition :)

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