🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sun, 18 Mar 2012 09:10:25 -0400, David Lamb <dal...@cs.queensu.ca>
wrote:

>On 17/03/2012 8:00 PM, Rin Stowleigh wrote:
>> On Sat, 17 Mar 2012 16:41:45 -0700, John Slade<hhit...@pacbell.net>
>>>       What everyone seems to want to do is be the next WOW. Well
>>> WOW already has that market and anyone else trying to get into
>>> it will probably fail.
>
>Not relevant to Skyrim, but: wouldn't a change of genre, e.g. to science 
>fiction, make a difference?

There was a lot of speculation this big MMO project might be a Fallout
series world instead.  Personally I wish it was.  But a setting that I
prefer does not necessarily mean it would be a better or more
successful game.  I played some "wasteland" themed MMORPG about 5
years or so ago, and it was so horrible that I can't even remember the
name of it [side note, I noticed that Wasteland 2 is in development...
maybe I'll post a second thread for that one]

Its been known for a while that they've been staffing up in areas that
made it clear MMO was one direction the company was headed.  During
the hiring process you can only prevent word of mouth to a limited
degree.  What nobody knew before now was whether it would be an Elder
Scrolls type game, a Fallout game, something else, etc.  Looks like
the recent success of Skyrim might have helped them make up their
minds.

>> For example, Admin Joe doesn't like the most recent patch.  It nerfs
>> his beloved charmed longstaff too much.  He liked the old way where he
>> was in his comfort zone.  So, he just doesn't apply it.  Now his
>> server shows up in the server list, but when people join they get
>> client mismatch errors.
>
>Can't the server list include the server version?

Well it could, and games have used this to varying degrees of failure
in the past.  One of the problems is the including the server version
as a column in a grid takes up precious screen space in the server
browser.  Then, assuming you can sacrifice some column for display or
find ways of cramming another column in, it ends up looking so
cluttered with v1.2.1, v1.2.3, etc that it demotivates one to bother
playing the game at all.  What ends up happing is people just set
their filters to exclude hits for non matching versions, then there is
no motive to go back and clear the filter once in a while.  This means
they end up playing on Admin Joe's server forever, and forming all of
their opinions of the game based on the way it plays on his server.
Then at whatever point they get fed up with Admin Joe and his inbred
world of restrictions and rules, they conclude the game sucks and just
stop playing it.  As I said it's killed off more than one great
multiplayer game.

>>The game is not going to be fun if a clan can set up cheat-capable servers
>> for their people to level up, then folks with ungodly powers can go to
>> any other server and abuse (or just have the upper hand on) the
>> mainstream crowd.
>
>Disallow character transfer between servers?

Then you only have server-specific character leveling.  That means
you're a level 50 only on Admin Joes server.  In a series like the
Elder Scrolls that is catastrophic, because most people want to
develop their character, meaning that even if you don't have the
server/client mismatch problem I described above, you have a bigger
problem in the sense that when Admin Joe gets fired at work and cannot
afford to pay his ISP bill anymore, his server goes down and the
character you worked for months on is gone forever.

There are of course ways around every problem.  For example, while Far
Cry 2 was neither an MMO nor an RPG, the syndrome I described above
was averted in an interesting way.  There was ranked mode and player
mode, dedicated servers and non dedicated servers.  Ranked mode stored
persistent level info (weapons you unlocked etc) centrally, so you
always took your loadout and level with you.  In player mode you were
only leveled up within that session, and the server admin could adjust
things like starting everyone out with maximum unlocks right off the
bat, or a certain number of points to buy your initial loadout, etc.
Also the leveling up was faster in player mode, so if you played for
an hour you would probably unlock a few more weapons during that time.

They could do something like that.  For TES MMO, as I said whether it
all works or not will come down to the overall design and execution of
it.