When Psychochild put up his design challenge this past weekend, I immediately had an answer and sat down to write it out. Then … (?)

Anyway, a few days later, here’s my take on this week’s homework:

Inspired by my two olde tyme posts, Acting Casual About Casual Gamers and Why Socializers are our Comrades, this weekend’s challenge is this:

What long-standing problems do you still see in online games? Now, go a step further and propose a solution.

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I realize this is totally offtopic, but that’s what the combination of ‘Aside’ and ‘NonMMOG’ as topic selections will get you.

I’ve been really enjoying using Netflix to vicariously look at other people’s netflix preferences recently. They’ve got a feature where, if you’re hooked up with another user, you can see what they have in their queue and what they’ve rated recently. It’s a startlingly honest look at a person’s personal attitude, and I’ve gotten a kick out of looking at even just the few folks I’m already hooked up with.

If you’d like to /friend me, send me an email (it’s on the ‘About’ page) and we can be flix-buddies. Please don’t use the system’s friender to friend the email on the About page, though. That’s not the one I use on my Netflix account. :)

Creepily interested in your move-watching habits,

- Michael

I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of the fallout from SOE’s influencer’s summit (sniffle), and one of the things I heartily agreed with was Brent’s observations about Sony’s player support. The EQ 2 Players site is amazing, and I knew that they were talking about something similar for Vanguard. Indeed, the Vanguard Players page is a tremendous piece of work. What I didn’t know is that characters have individual, automated blogs. (Thanik, that avatar, is character of the day today.) The blog updates every time you ding, and takes a UI-less screenshot of your surroundings. Thanik is apparently a busy boy, because he’s also got numerous posts showing that he’s been the first person in the game on his server to explore several areas and find several items.

Thanik, accompanied by Fjir, Sapa and Izyrius, was the first person on Shidreth to discover the item Kullom’s Belt in Thelaseen.

Hats off to SOE for an awesome feature.

If I can, I’d like to take a minute to tell you why the fact that Blizzard is throwing an Arena PvP Grand Championship is OMGawesome. I’m a huge fan of this idea, and it’s not because I see myself pwning my way to fame and fortune. A PvP god, I’m not.

Blizzard is organizing a worldwide community around this competition. Its many millions-strong membership all have a passing familiarity with the fundamentals of this sporting event. And, at several millions-strong, it’s not a bad basis for a sporting league to start. The WoW community has already proven its creativity and enthusiasm in events like the XFire movie contest. I don’t imagine their enthusiasm for this PvP event will be any less.

What I find really intriguing about this concept is that we could see some well-produced video of the event. I like YouTube videos as much as the next guy, but I’ve seen what can be done with a little more professional attitude. The amazing display that was last year’s EVE TV PvP Coverage could easily be replicated with WoW’s Arena event.

Taken to the next step, what I’d love to see is some of this footage being aired on a cable network! Networks already planning to carry (or have carried) pro gaming footage in the states. Why not an event like this? It’d be a great chance to get word about the game out more, and it’d be a chance for us genre fans to enjoy some MMOG footage off of the intertubes.

Even though there’s no way I’m going to participate, I really hope the WoW tourney turns out well. And for you folks who are planning on entering: good luck!

Update 02/17:

Signore Abalieno was good enough to accommodate me with a response (yay debate), and so I’m updating to respond. I figured I’d just update this post, in case we do some more responding, so the rss feed doesn’t become the ‘beating the dead horse’ show.
Sir: First, due to the contextless nature of interweb communication, I don’t know if you took offense to my poking? I’d like to say that I hope you haven’t. I hope you know I respect your opinion, and just wanted to voice my own two platinum worth of opinion. So, first and foremost – no offense intended. :)

That said …

Then you can argue that this is not going to be the case, that making it a WoW clone means making it MORE successful. I accept that point of view (while disagreeing), but I don’t accept if you say that I’m whining because they didn’t build a game for ME.

Indeed, my apologies. I was assuming that you were talking from your perspective because … well, that’s generally what I do. I can only really speak from my perspective.

What I said is that MEO is another huge wasted potential. And for “potential” I NEVER, in any case, intend a kind of niche and selected audience. I never write with a niche audience in mind and I never mistake my personal preference for what everyone else must like as well. This is valid both for my opinions as for my design ideas. The great majority of things I write here are intended to be in the interest of the majority of people, hopefully, but not obligatorily, including me.

I understand where you’re coming from, and in that sense I agree. If they’d done something really new and different with MEO (like, say, the Metacharacters I mentioned the other day), it’d be mighty fine. I still don’t understand where you’re coming from, from a ‘widespread audience’ POV. In fact, I guess I understand your argument less from the perspective of a wider audience. WoW has proven itself ridiculously popular; it is the mass-market MMOG. Even trying for WoWishness would seem to guarantee a modicum of success in a wide audience. Why try something new and unproven when there’s a proven formula out there to emulate?

And I surely don’t believe that SWG wasn’t successful because NOT COMPLETELY a diku in space. That’s a wrong lesson that you and many others have learnt. Or better, a wrong assumption.

I hope that you’re aware of my opinions on SWG at this point. :) I *loved* the non-diku parts of SWG. I wish more games had dancing Wookies, to be honest. That said, I think that the innovative elements of SWG may have had something to do with its lack of success. Specifically, the differences between Galaxies and previous games probably had something to do with its its initial weak reception.

Above all, I want to make clear that I don’t innovation is an impediment to financial success. Building a game that’s exactly like every previous title only works if you’re EA and making Madden games. That said, I think it’s hard to fault Turbine for wanting to play it ’safe’ with such an important license. As you say, LoTR has a lot of potential.

What’s a better use of that potential? An innovative game that no one plays, or a knock-off that allows them to make some money off of an undoubtedly very expensive license?

I don’t know if I have a good answer to that question … but there you go.
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Reinhart talks on his site about the possibility of a Kojima-created zombie MMOG. Kotaku has a bit of coverage on it, and M&G goes into the possible awesomeness of the game. In discussing the possibilities of post-permadeath gameplay, he brings up one of my new favorite things to noodle in Massive design: the concept of a MetaCharacter.

The idea is, essentially, that the majority of advancement based mechanics are account specific, not character specific. A metacharacter game would have some super-identity that encompasses all of the individual characters.

I talked about this a bit last October in the context of PvP in LOTRO, and I think it’s definitely an idea whose time has come. While thinking about Massive games has usually been encouraging of that ethereal quality ‘immersion’, I think we’re getting to the point where that might be a touch outmoded. Ask your average WoW player (with three or four level 60s spread across multiple servers) about immersion, and you will probably get a blank stare. At this point I think a lot of the players ‘raised’ on WoW would consider elaborate immersion techniques a waste of time.

I’m not sure I’d agree they are wastes of time, but I understand wanting to play multiple classes over time. I’d much rather something like a modified FFXI job system. For an individual character, say, as you increase in levels in the primary job you raise all of your other classes by 1 level per 3 or 4 ‘real’ levels. That way, overall experience in the game is reflected on your character even if you haven’t played a specific class.

I find it even more interesting to think of the purely meta concept Brandon brings up. You play along with a character, but it’s a simple shell of convenience. (Watching Stand Alone Complex right now, so ’shell’ seemed appropriate.) Whoever wants to play the healer that night can play inside a dwarven priest, and the melee guy tonight is the human warrior. On another night, the guy playing the priest might be the rogue, or the warlock, or whatever.

These games are, at the end of the day, about playing with people, not characters, and anything that gets in the way of that seems like a shame. A buddy of mine and and I had a big problem along those lines in WoW; we both played Paladins, and so grouping was always kind of awkward. Why do you need two Pallys in a group? If I’d been able to swap into another class … or even another talent build … while in the group, I would have played with him a lot more often.

It’s especially interesting in the context of a less traditional massive game. In the context of LOTRO I thought it would be neat to be able to ‘level up’ the type of monster you could play as, to give the good guys an intelligent and reactive ‘evil side’ to face down. The same could be said of the Zombie MMOG; you go from newbie zomebit to ‘fast’ zombie to .. um … Nemesis? The PC title The Crossing is heading down this road a bit, and it’s an interesting path to follow.

Am I wrong here? Are individual characters really that important?

I do so love the podcasts. Love them so verry, verry much. You should listen to them too. These are the ones I listen to. Perhaps you will like them as well?

• 1up Yours
• alt.NPR
• Marketplace
• DnD Podcast
• EQ2 Daily
• GDC Daily
• NPR Driveway Moments
• Radio Expeditions
• NPR Story of the Day
• NPR World Story of the Day
• Official SOE Podcast
• Yivvits and Mr. Bubble
• Taverncast
• The 1up Show
• This American Life
• VirginWorlds
• Major Nelson
• WARTalk

I would especially like to point out the awesomeness of YAMB, which I only recently started listening to as a result of Brent’s coverage of the SOE community summit. For the win. Also, Taverncast has a new site. Nice looking work, guys. Nice work.