Richard Bartle’s very well read Players who Suit Muds is an essay designed to give players and designers a way to talk about Player Types. It’s an incredibly useful tool, and was later made into a test designed to measure your Bartle Quotient. If you’ve ever seen someone’s signature and it said something like “34% Explorer, 42% Socializer”, they were referring to their results from the Bartle test. This is all well and good, but how do the concepts of Player Types actually help us as players? It’s nice to be able to brand yourself in such a way that people understand you, but what is the benefit? In the past, the different MMOGs have been examined for what kinds of players they mainly appeal to. I’m going to go into some specifics today as regards how the different player types will interact with some of the newer games that we’ve seen become available. Down at the bottom of this article I’ve included a list of most of the major MMOGs and the player types they cater to.

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Today I’ll be talking briefly about the basis of any MMOG economy, the currency. Currency in Massively Multiplayer games is almost universally oversimplified. Coin standards in vastly different games have an overwhelming similarity because game designers are content to use familiar conventions. Players don’t mind because they don’t have to learn a new currency system. But when talking about world immersion or in-world consistency, does the same old same old make sense?

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We now return you to your semi-regularly scheduled programming. For the near future, I’m going to get out a Random Dialogue as per normal on Monday, and a WoW Beta Journal on Thursday. Very sorry about last week, but a small touch of the plague had me (and Ekim as well) down and distracted. I am feeling much better, and you should be enjoying a full set of editorials and features this week. Today, I’m going to talk about those unrespected actors that make our MMOG lives so rewarding…the Non-Player Character. Non-Player Characters (NPCs) are a type of mob used to populate the world of a massively multiplayer game with “people”. For your consideration this week are short discussions on NPC interaction and memory, their places in the world, and their relations to Player Characters. This week’s Random Dialogue is dedicated to Martin Sayer, my favorite NPC, who taught me that children as loot equals a gnoll slaying sword.

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