“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
– Isaac Asimov
The following are simple requirements for an MMORPG (’massive multiplayer online role playing game’, such as World of Warcraft, Everquest, and the 3000 others currently out) to be good; which is to say .. the rest of the game may be perfectly (or terribly) executed, but without these items, the game can at best be ‘okay.’
Currently, I’m criticising TERA, but the points apply universally IMHO.
Assuming this is a war based game such as WoW, Age of Conan, TERA, EVE Online, _etc_, then there must be reason for war. Mostly, this is a PvP (player versus player) standpoint, since generally any game can have a PvE (versus Environemnt, the AI enemy) rationale easily enough. With WoW, tthere are ‘factions’, generally viewed (incorrectly) as Good and Evil; the two factions can’t communicate, and generally are ‘forced’ into war with each other. Players can join either side. Arguments against factions include ‘dividing the player base’ and ‘doubling content’ (multiple starting areas, basicly alike, with different factions guys), and others. But the advantage is.. reason for conflict. One faction fights another, because the ‘factionsa re at war.’ You dont’ needlessly go around killing just any old random person. The world generally has ‘this is my home base, so I don’t shit where I eat.’ Forced factions as in WoW works, but is perhaps a ‘dumb default’ — better than nothing. In a game like EVE, there is only player factions.. if the players dont’ step up and do it, the game sucks and ends up in anarchy.. random PvP for no reason, which is fine.. but lacks ‘interest.’ But in EVE, the players have stepped up and generated intrigue all over, so it works well.
In TERA, it is yet to be seen .. there are no factions,.. rather, all players are on the same side; in PvP it basicly is out of band.. theres no reason why playes in one army woudl fight each other, and everyone looks the same. Theres no ‘that guy looks liek the enemy’, and theres no ‘this is my home base, I’m killing you for coming near’…. there is some basic politicking system though, and Guild Versus Giuld is simple and boring, but they’re growin git all (and the game is a week old, cut it some slack ;) — so we’ll see.
We’ll have to see for TERA, but my poiint is .. for any MMO to succeed, factgionks or player factions have to work.
Seamless world; WoW did this right, right off the bat — you can walk from one nd of the world to the other .. mostly (changing continents using a boat or blimp would load, but that seems acceptible; they probably don’t even ne3ed to do it, just do.) A lot of MMOs do this, which is great. Some do not, and it is bad. Age of Conan was where I really experienced it — from one ‘province’ to another, there were well defined ‘checkpoints’, where oyu had to go and talk to someone and teleport to the next province (essentially.) You could not walk there, and it was at specific points. (Which was aggravated by the factionless PvP, so ‘griefers’ would camp out at the chockpoint teleport NPCs and kill people as they came by.. pretty annoying.)
Another painful form of this is ‘instancing.’ In many games you ‘instance’ (get your own private copy of the world) during dungeons (with your current party/team), and I consideer that okay, to make a more deeper feel; but in general, there has to be ‘one world’ (at least in the same server, or as EVE does it.. one world, period.) If 50 peopel show up in one place, they need to all be tehre. It makes coding harder to handle if the entire population of a server decides to meet up somewhere, but thats why the developers get the big bucks :) More to point.. if you have 50 copies one of city, with 30 people in each, it takes away from the game. Especially if 3 peopole are trying to meet up, and are switfching htie rinstances to try to meet up, its just silly. Or if you’re stalking someone in PvP, and they flip to some other instance and ‘op’ are gone… or if they teleport to another province, so you can’t just follow them.. it breaks immersion.
MMOs are big, but if they feel small.. they’re not Massive, anymore.
RPGs since the dawn of time had multiple classes (or were entirely class-less where you could pick a variet of skills from a pool.) Either way, everyone could customize. In the pencil and paper days you could al be warriors even, but still be thin or fat or have various backgrounds or ticks or whatever, it was in your imagination; in MMORPG via computer, most of them allow a fair degree of customization.. so while there might be a half dozen rreaces, everyone of each race shoudl not look alike. If theres 5 races, and really only 5 or 10 total looks.. thats bad across a population of 10s of thousands of players.
Likewise, each class has to have subclases or choices of skills or other ways ot be different; if every warrior carries the same weapon (or worse, can _only_ carry the same weapon), its bad. ie: If the game rewards choices and other choices are just bad due to poor design, everyone will take the good choices and be the same (WoW’s “cookie cutter” reputation); or in TERA, where each class really has one weapon or style.. Sorcers use a floating star thing and bounce it around; berzerkers use an axe, always. Warriors.. alwasys two swords. There may be good reasons — so plaayers don’t fight over loot much, say? Or fore lore reason such as in Warhammer (where I think the boardgame lore was stuck too closely to, costing the game..) .. I’m just not too sure I want to play a game where even the rest of the ghame is well done — gorgeous artwork and scenery, well implemented game without crashing etc, feels good, decent design and combat, ec and so on … but everyone looks and players just like me.
Again, its not Massive, if everyone feels like clones.
Please ignore the following proof that I’m really sleep deprived. Comments in IRC:
[01:10:22] * skeezix climbs a parabola
[01:11:20] skeezix: You know its time for bed when you consider picturing the graphed output of functions, to determine which is the best to climb upon
[01:09:24] skeezix: IF two photos point at each other and take a shot at trhe same time.. do they swap location or just clothes?
[01:10:00] skeezix: If you get drunk near the speed of light, can you leave the hangover behind?
[00:52:55] Tuxedo: Everywhere I worked during co-op, they had those printers.
[00:53:04] Tuxedo: I assumed they’d be around forever. I was young and foolish.
[00:53:20] skeezix: now the only place they .. purr .. is under your futon?
[00:53:37] skeezix: the ratta-tat-ratta-tat noise that takes you back to Nam, 1975?
[00:54:07] skeezix: You were in tyhe jungle, just saw your best mate taken down by a beartrap.. not to kill, but to maim, to make you want ot stay, to carry him or
help him walk; to slow you down, so the VC could punish you.
[00:54:14] skeezix: But you showed them, you showed them all!
[00:55:23] skeezix: You took that printer, used it to unseam and then eviscerate your pal, wear his flesh like a new suit. Thats why they call you the Tuxedo eversince.
[00:55:33] * Tuxedo LOL
[00:55:42] skeezix: Then, after leeping down the gorge and parachuting with the dead mans flesh, you escaped.
[00:55:50] skeezix: Now it is they, they who hear the ratta-tat when the rain falls.
[00:55:53] Tuxedo: Man, babies and sleep-dep must do something twisted to your visual cortex. :)
I posted this as a status update to FB, but thought it worth crossposting here:
Always a weird problem though, since of course.. the business guys, the suits, they _run the shop_; I call it ‘Rikering’, after Will Riker in Star Trek; a number of episodes talked about how he was offered captaincy over his own ship but refused, liking his current employ (the staff, the ship, the work.) If he kept turning it down, he’d stop getting offers and eventually get viewed as lesser. In real life there is also the well known other side of the coin — if you take the step up, you risk the ‘Peter principle’, where you eventually get elevated to a position you dislike or aren’t good at, and get fired or viewed lesser. Obviously, between these two principles, the classic joke is — you progress until you get in hot water, then switch to another place. Peachy.
Anyway, its a funny but very real problem; as a serious coder, you’re hired to a junior position fresh out of school and then work your way up to senior developer, or tech team lead, or other tech position. With just a few years, you’re at the peek of where you can go, technically. In my current position, I was pretty much peak on the day I was hired. So many times I’ve had options to work into management etc, but I look at that as a downgrade — to step from top tech positions to junior management or other related ‘business side’ work. Or crossgrade jumps to say Business Analyst, which is a fine position. Its not up from tech, its equal, in another stream.. yet, classic slant is that tech is beneath these positions..
You want to go anywhere else, and its management .. your technical skills go to waste. Silliness. If you’re lucky, you go for Designer/Architect roles.
No wonder everyone I know has opened their own companies (myself included) :) Small companies are meritocracies .. you do it all, and you’re valued by your contribution.
How do we get ourselves into these messes :)
You know, my random inane day to day chatter ends up on facebook these days; I’m not even a fan of FB, rather one who loathes it due to their evil. Still, being up all night with babies does lend itself well to FBing..
Anyway, oddly enough in terms of gaming, I’m most looking forwar dto two indies right now — the Legend of Grimrock is due April 2012, and a fan made Wing Commander sequal is due March-April 2012 .. ie: both of these are right around the corner!
Retro (or retraux?) dungeon romping, and retro space battle … yum
Oh, and Diablo III in a few months looks pretty tasty, too.
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
I just posted this to FB; it might make some people mad.
If you can’t discuss things, then your’e a fanatic; so when hard questions come up, you have to be able to discuss them.
Sadly, these recent rants of mine are not really fair .. they’re pointed, laying some traps, or just in bad humour. I’m sorry about that.. usually I’m pretty level and decent.
The reason for the poison is, a good friend of mine is dieing of cancer; he’s mid-30s, and not going to last more than another week or two; when I think on it, or go see him, it makes me mad. Cancer is tough .. if the rich (Steve Jobs) can’t take it on with much chance, theres not much hope; really it depends on the ‘type’ and ‘location’ and so forth, but we really so far have only a couple tools — i) chemo (try to kill everything, maybe the host survives). ii) radiation (try to laser strike specific spots, and hope the host survives) and iii) lopping parts off…. and hoping the host can survive. But if it strieks in your brain, your esophagus, or other sensitive bits.. you’ve got barely a chance at all. It hurts young more than old (cancer is just rapidly growing bits, and old peopel don’t have cell splits as often as young people; so you’d intuitively think younger can take more damage, can survive better.. but when its cancer, it kills the young much faster and effectively than the old. This is why when it lands on an 8 year old child, its ten times unfair.. they miss their whole life, and its just going to wipe them out :(..
Anyway, these visits make me have dark thoughts, so I rant a bit.
Dont’ think badly on me.
–
Don’t read this if you’re religious :P
I don’t want to piss anyone off, but sometimes I ask hard or mean questions. This one came to mind when I was seeing something that shouldn’t happen, but does..
Say you have a mother, who raises her child to 5 (or otherwise young but not ready age) and then just walks out on them; clearly thats either horrible or screwed up (say they’re a CIA agent who hid es to protect them.. honorable but awful nonetheless?) Most likely you’d have hard words for such an awful person who walks out on the young. Well, maybe I’m not talking about mothers.. but if its so bad for a mother, why would this be acceptible behaviour for a god to create a species and then just walk out on them?
Okay, so sure, you think the deity gave them guiding principles and the training to survive and grow on their own? Can’t watch them all the time? Well, you’ve all seen the horrors our species can do.. were we ready? Could you really trust us? We’re a species who tortures each otehr at times odf war.. who has wars. Not much better than roaches sometimes..
Or maybe the deity is a guiding hand, standing aways off; a lifeguard who watches someone drown?
Or maybe its just the kind of deity that just creates and watches from afar, keeps a keen loving eye on his creation? has a handy in daily affairs? Oh wait, we have birth defects or other pure-bad-luck horrors, not created by the fault of man?
Or maybe it was all caused by the initial spoil, some evil dead done in Eden? Wait, so everyone for all of history is to blame, for that?
I dunno folks, sometimes when you see things happen that shouldn’t, it makes you wonder, right?
OKay, our species has done great beauty, too; there are many wonders we have performed, all on our own. But for thos who believe, its good be hard sometimes.
“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”
― Albert Einstein
—The Structure & Interpretation of Computer Programs
See, heres one of the Great Questions.
Is this just a case where religious folks have to agree to say “in this case, one of us is right; we don’t know, but one of us has a religion thats wrong.”?
Or what about religions that have common ancestry but have diverged significantly and have very different opinions on things nowadays? Isn’t that a problem?
We wonmt’ go near a third problem which is .. given that thinking in terms of religionm implies that you’re willing to accept ‘ghosts’ and ‘unexplainable things’ and so on, you’re pretty much opening up the forum to everything. Faeries? Why _not_? I mean, if there can be no proof for/against a given religion, then the same is true for faeries, right?(Or for people who make up crazy pseudo religions like the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Sciontology, who most would agree are basicly just silly.)
Faith is there because theres nothing else; but you believe, in your heart. Thats faith, and its powerful. I get it. But how do you deal with others having a different faith, maybe an opposite one, of equal conviction?