Most people on the Interweb are fairly normal. You know, they post pictures of their cats, sometimes they gossip about work, sometimes they bitch about politics. Much like people everywhere.
Some people on the net are… well, quite obviously crazy. You know the ones, it’s usually something about the patriarchy or the dangers of fundamentalist preachers or intelligent insect armies or long, disturbing fantasies about family members getting it on with each other. And that’s just science fiction writers.
Then you get the ones that are like speakers of foreign languages that you kind of sort of know. You cock your head to one side, because it sounds like they should be making sense, using words that you’re pretty sure are used by normal educated people, but put together differently. Until finally, after in-depth analysis, you realize that dear God, you just wasted your time, because this person isn’t just misunderstood, they really don’t make any sense.
As part of that, I give you Prokofy Neva, probably Second Life’s most infamous avatar and certainly one of its most interviewed by the mass media. There’s not usually much to comment about Neva’s blogs (yes, she has three now), mainly because she focuses absolutely on Second Life and treats other endeavours like MMORPGs and Wikipedia as ridiculous or evil or, usually, both. In fact, pretty much anything Neva doesn’t understand, or hasn’t heard of, she treats as dismissively unimportant. Like, say, SXSW, a live music and film festival that shuts Austin’s traffic and parking down on a yearly basis. Oh, wait, no, it’s not important!
While tekkies and geeks everywhere thinks SXSW is the epitome of culture, it isn’t really, because not only have most normal people never heard of it (it’s in Austin, Texas and a few thousand people go bar-hopping and watch movies and hear panels about games at it annually), those that have wonder privately if it has peaked.
Well, that explains it, I suppose.
However, apparently Richard Bartle made the mistake of giving an interview in Second Life, and in so doing, attracting the gaze of the lidless eye.
How *could* Richard Bartle and his MUDs and whatnot have anything to do with Metanomics when Richard Bartle, as a good British socialist and intrinsic Marxist (although he’d deny everything but the British part likely) is opposed to virtual economies. He really really hates RMT, and he wants to set up a giant commission in the sky to scold REALLY hard all those nasty smug little Chinese boys that go around gold-farming and interrupting everybody’s game! For shame! Shame, shame, little Chinese boys (and Western round-eyes who do the same thing, essentially, in Second Life or some place). Shame! Maybe if we all hold hands and chant STOP THE GOLD FARMING, KILL THE RMT really really hard, we can make Tinkerbell wake up and prevent money from leaking into and out of games! Evil money! Evil capitalism!
As I said, Prokofy looks at everything through the Second Life filter. People make money in Second Life. Therefore making money is good. Why would people be against making money anywhere else? Not that anywhere else actually matters, or that you’ve heard of. But Bartle’s said that he’s against RMT in games, and people call Second Life a game, therefore, burn the heretic! Plus, he’s English so he’s probably a Commie. Or gay. No, better go with commie. They’re all lefties there, donchanow.
But, we get some clarity as to what Neva is on about: it seems Bartle didn’t speak up when they came for the Jews, or something.
Or, he could have said, “Yes, we’ve seen such a textbook example of the dynamics of griefing in that utter savaging of you on Terra Nova in the w-hat thread, and the solution should be not banning people but enabling them speak in defense of themselves, to have good speech drive out bad eventually.”
Instead, he began this total nihilist Marxian rant about the impossiblity of ever having any sort of agreed-upon morality such as to define some minimal code of behaviour (he wasn’t even willing to concede a game-god’s TOS, it was wacky).
[Let us pause for a Moment of Reflection, and recall that when it came to RMT…evil little Chinese boys…gold…there WAS an absolute, rock-solid, non-subjective, absolutely objective moral imperative which we could all invoke, which was (*holds up Cross*): evil, evil game gold mined by evil evil kiddies disrupting the game and CHEATING *gasp*!)
But griefing? Naaah, no moral imperative. It’s anything goes. P.S. this is a good example why socialism always and inevitably turns to crime.
Note that Prokofy Neva is one of the few people actually banned from commenting on Terra Nova. Note that Richard Bartle is on Terra Nova’s masthead. AT LAST ALL IS CLEAR.
But just in case you still were confused, Prokofy Neva finally drives a stake in the Bartle Player Types!
Unfortunately, with the usual crashes and lags and idiocies, I couldn’t get more than about half of what he was saying, but he did dwell quite a bit (because unfortunately Robert Bloomfield set him up to dwell on it) on these four avatar classes in games, which were something like, um, let me think now: Asian, African, American, Middle Eastern. No wait. Man Boy Women Girl. Wait. Let me check my notes. Explorer. Doer. Uhhhh Entitlement-Happy Clueless Git Nutsack. And uh…
What was it again?
Remember kids, what we don’t understand? We mock. And I really, really don’t understand Prokofy Neva.
#1 by Sumyung Guy on March 15th, 2008
Great Good Googley Moogley, 400 replies?
Geez. You’d think this was a thread about PvP vs PvE and the realities of consensual PvP vs. the good ol’ days of UO or something
#2 by Fleep Tuque on March 15th, 2008
Scott Jennings: You are not an idiot, but you have most certainly done a terrible job of moderating this thread.
Prokofy: This is the key for me, “..ponder what it means for the poor Chinese boys of the world to be game-golding in WOW and being punishment (sic), even with threat of real-life prosecution, and the transfer of wealth this indicates, and the turfing out of games everywhere of poor people who grab at the big online economy to try to advance themselves.”
This is where my previous experience as a “geek gamer grrrl” begins to look like what it was – child’s play. And there are many more playing, and that play can be very beneficial and can and should be, for want of a better word, protected. The social activity occurring in many game worlds is all about learning to socialize, learning to lead, learning to cooperate, learning to think and strategize – and by being bound by the rules of the game, there is a structure enforced upon this play that I believe helps guide it. Having centralized goals, “kill the dragon, get the sword,” enables and drives the building of real community (admittedly a word that I think means different things to you and I, but bear with me here) because without a common purpose there would be none and for many players (not residents, or citizens, or consumers, or workers, or gold-farmers) it is their first experience with having a real influence on a real community. I think of many guilds and many other online communities as a social good, in political terms, they’re beginning to replace some parts of the civic culture that is so crucial to democracy, a civic culture that at least in American society is dying out – think bowling leagues and card party circles and even church circles.
Now to your greater point, yes, it is certainly true that the privilege to play a game is one not shared by all. The hypothetical “Chinese boys” that I imagine in the context of your statement do not have the luxury to play any other game than the Game of Life, eat or be eaten, do what one must or can to fill the belly. Poverty and extreme deprivation are very, very real and at the crux of whatever else I may disagree with you about, I do agree with you on this point – when the “game” enjoyed by “players” in developed nations starts enforcing the “game” rules with real world imprisonment (because it hurts their bottom line), then it is no longer just a “game” at all. It is something else, no matter how badly the “players” wish it were just a safe game to play. It is a business, it is an economic force, it is or can be a society. It can be many things but it cannot be “just” a game. You don’t go to jail for breaking the rules of a football game, you go to jail for breaking the rules of a state. When selling your sword on ebay might land you in jail, and when the sword, or more accurately the labor to get the sword is worth more than the labor to do something else, we’re not talking about _games_ any more.
I don’t know the answer to this question you raised, but it is a terribly important one and I do sincerely laud you for asking it. I’ll be thinking about it perhaps for the rest of my life, both real and virtual.
To Richard Bartle and the other posters of this forum: Diatribes and invectives and hurled insults aside, you should have a conscience that is offended by at least parts of the paradigm you’re engaged in. I mudded, I played MMO(RPGs), I experienced the wonder, the joy, the pure unadulterated _fun_ that is perhaps uniquely to be found in game worlds. I even fell in love with all the exuberance of every dumb game wedding you’ve ever heard about, crashed, or took part in (I was 19, after all, and found my soul mate, what’s a girl to do but marry the guy on Mahn Tor where we met, whether it exists “for real” or not? And I only mention this as proof of my street cred and/or youthful immersion, as it were).
It was fun and I loved it. But I’m also very aware that it was a privilege, and one that I can still enjoy from time to time, but when I’m not playing in it, I’m learning and working in the real world to make it so that others can have that privilege to play. Your sword is not worth more than another person’s ability to feed herself, is it? You can ignore the larger questions, you can have your fun, but if you have a social conscience, you really should be thinking about the larger questions, and seeking answers to them.
It is NOT just a question of whether RMT suits your “playstyle” or not, it’s that RMT in an economy as large as that of WOW’s, that Neil cites as a “fast forward to get over the boring parts”, can also be a fast forward to “making a better living than my geopolitical location otherwise allows me”. The latter is what “gold farming” is for some, or MOST IMPORTANTLY – WHAT IT MAY POTENTIALLY BE as virtual worlds AND game worlds continue to evolve – and you simply cannot trivialize and dismiss that.
For the tl;dr crowd, my final point: If you’re really a gamer, like really? Then you’ve done your share of grinding and in your heart of hearts, some of it felt like _work_. Like real world boring ass work. Like this sucks work. Now ask yourself how you could be better spending that time. In real space or virtual. Time is short, life is short, and grinding is for the birds. There are better things to do with your life.
I am cross-posting this to my own blog and I _will_ be doing a better job of moderating any comments that may come in, so be forewarned. If you’d like to carry on a conversation and exploration of this topic, feel free to join me there.
#3 by n4omi?? on March 15th, 2008
ok, on behalf of the “geek gamer grrrl”s, i gotta say……..
OMG WALL OF TEXT 4T3HL0SS
and, as a “geek gamer grrrl” , second life is everything i hate, a badly coded mess aimed at internet pervs and furries….
this is why soccer moms should be banned from online gaming…….
#4 by Scott Jennings on March 16th, 2008
Scott Jennings: You are not an idiot, but you have most certainly done a terrible job of moderating this thread.
I also have been doing a terrible job of solving the strife in the Middle East and eradicating poverty.
It is NOT just a question of whether RMT suits your “playstyle” or not, it’s that RMT in an economy as large as that of WOW’s, that Neil cites as a “fast forward to get over the boring parts”, can also be a fast forward to “making a better living than my geopolitical location otherwise allows me”. The latter is what “gold farming” is for some, or MOST IMPORTANTLY – WHAT IT MAY POTENTIALLY BE as virtual worlds AND game worlds continue to evolve – and you simply cannot trivialize and dismiss that.
So… your argument is that RMT should be permitted in any game, regardless of the wishes of its maintainers and users, because it’s a way for workers in third-world countries to better themselves.
This is not a good argument. It’s definitely an original argument, though.
#5 by Damion on March 16th, 2008
Ever heard of Drakedog? Many players are willing to play the ‘less powerful’ classes in a game, because guess what: they are not actually less powerful *gasp*. They are different.
If I had meant ‘powerful = identical’, I would have said so. Classes should all feel very powerful, in very different ways. However, fall short for a class, and you are screwing with someone’s aspirational fantasies. As a way of example: paladins started their characters to tank, or to DPS with a big freakin’ hammer. Most of them worked all the way through the content to find that they had to stand in the back and heal.
[T]he approach WAR is using [is one of measuring the quality of gear and ablities via a score and so] WAR will not really have this problem.
It’s an intriguing solution, but not nearly as much of a silver bullet as you imagine. How many level 65 characters equals one 70? How do you factor in player skill? Teamwork? Compatible class dynamics? Premades on voice chat?
It’s just that the progression associated with raiding can too easily end up feeling required, leaving players unable to focus on having fun; instead they feel obligated to play and raid efficiently.
If Black Temple were so easy any collection of 25 schmucks could do it, WoW would be a ghost town now. Because if it is so easy that any 25 schmucks can do it, then 25 relatively competent people smoked it, and 25 actually skilled players are wondering why the hell they’re playing this kid’s game.
You define grind very differently than I do. ‘Grind’ is what happens when the game ceases to be tactically interested. You said that WoW didn’t have a grind in the solo game. I think most people agreed with you – the first time they played it. Heck, remember when Deadmines were considered a death trap? Now, people running their second, third, or sixth characters through know the rules and the roles so well, that some people run it with Rogues as the main tank. Now, 1-60 is the ‘grind’ that prevents you from seeing the cool tactical stuff.
Is there a grind in the raiding game? Certainly – Karazhan is seen by my entire guild as a grind, since we still need to run it for rewards, but the raid is now considered trivial. It didn’t used to be a grind – when we first got to Kara, it was a new, interesting and tactically different fight we’d never seen before every hour. Such is the nature of content, in a genre where players cannot adjust a difficulty toggle.
[y]our obsession with winning prevents you from seeing that other players don’t always think the same way.
Saying that players value ‘fun’ over ‘winning’ ignores the simple fact that success, as a core feeling, is very, very fun. And part of the reason that people play video games is because they do not get to encounter neat and tidy successes and see rewarding resolutions in the real world.
countless players in WoW say that early WoW PvP was their best time in the game.
They can be counted – be sure not to confuse anecdotal evidence with empirical data. As one example, we know that while PvP servers were more popular at launch, most of those servers dropped dramatically in nightly population and are now, on most servers, less crowded than their PvE counterparts.
Having worked on Shadowbane in the past, I can tell you that one real issue that that people overestimate how hardcore they are, and people underestimate their tolerance for being on the losing end of things. In battlegrounds, this is less problematic, as your losses are depersonalized (I didn’t lose, we did), but in the outside world, when people are trying to accomplish other things and they are being ganked on the side while trying to finish off a 20 minute excort quest, the feeling they’re feeling is one very different from exhileration.
#6 by Fleep Tuque on March 16th, 2008
Scott: You have no control over the Mideast peace process, you do control and are responsible for what you allow to be posted on your blog.
I’m not making an argument about whether RMT should or shouldn’t be allowed in closed game systems, I’m just pointing out that there is merit to the argument that “closed” game systems aren’t actually closed, and that there can be and are real, serious ethical questions that this raises. I think it’s disingenuous to talk about those questions as if we were only discussing a “game”.
#7 by James Haight on March 16th, 2008
I think one of the major separation criteria between games and worlds, virtual or not, is to what extent they’re open to RMT. To what extent would a game still be a game if the achievements and victories in it can simply be bought, instead of gained through skill and self-application? Not very much, in my opinion.
All the rest seems to me to be a shouting match between people who want WoW to be more like the one or the other, with awfully little in the way of real arguments, especially on the “world” side of things – save for this tripe about how the simple fact that most people prefer their /games/ to be /games/ is somehow the result of a conspiracy of Communist game designers, or something.
#8 by Taemojitsu on March 16th, 2008
Fleep, see this comment and this comment this comment… sorry that they all happen to be made by me, but no one else seems to relations between the different positions.
A bad game designer will make games were ‘gold farmers’, or at least the idealistic vision of a gold farmer where the person actually doing the grunt work makes most of the profit, do more ‘total good’ in the world than harm from their actions. Even if this is the case, a company will still do more ‘total good’ by outlawing and banning gold farming to keep the incidence rate low. However, a GOOD game designer will eliminate the conflict between ‘game reality’ and ‘real life’ by making a game where players feel no need to buy gold, because they can have fun without doing so.
Don’t try to compress it down into a yes/no answer, because it doesn’t work. ;)
#9 by Taemojitsu on March 16th, 2008
“As a way of example: paladins started their characters to tank, or to DPS with a big freakin’ hammer. Most of them worked all the way through the content to find that they had to stand in the back and heal.”
This is an example of something being clearly broken, not just ‘different’; however in the case of WoW, it’s not like the devs’ solution was really a solution, because a lot of pallies rolled a pally so they could be HYBRID, and all Blizzard has done is allow players to specialize in different roles than previously.
“It’s an intriguing solution, but not nearly as much of a silver bullet as you imagine. How many level 65 characters equals one 70? How do you factor in player skill? Teamwork? Compatible class dynamics? Premades on voice chat?”
Of course it isn’t perfect. But it’s a whole lot better than what WoW has, and as I said it will remove most of the incentive for players to buy gold or twink for PvP.
It isn’t [i]supposed[/i] to factor in player skill or teamwork.. ;) Maybe they’ll have a ‘premade bracket’ the way WoW tried, and failed to do with their crappy implementation of a matchmaking system. But ‘compensating’ for demonstrated skill is a different sort of thing than compensating for things like gear… you can do it, and in fact using performance-based metrics like that may be the best way to fix world PvP, but you cannot materially hinder players’ chances to [i]win[/i] in an environment that is even remotely about concrete rewards by whether or not they’ve showed in the past that they can play well, because it removes the incentive to try to play well at all. Why would you bother to try to win, when the system will match you up against teams that equally suck and you’ll have the same ‘honor flow’ either way.
Variability in the player is fundamentally different from variability in the character/’toon’.
“If Black Temple were so easy any collection of 25 schmucks could do it, WoW would be a ghost town now. Because if it is so easy that any 25 schmucks can do it, then 25 relatively competent people smoked it, and 25 actually skilled players are wondering why the hell they’re playing this kid’s game.”
What does this have to do with what you were replying to??
Lol. Guess what: I agree with you! (*with disclaimers.) Let’s leave it at that, this discussion went offtopic when we stopped talking about twinks and RMT ;)
“You define grind very differently than I do <…> You said that WoW didn’t have a grind in the solo game.”
Ah! I said WoW DID not have a grind in the solo game! Because of the flawed design and all the emphasis on grinding items at endgame, many players are no longer able to have fun at lower levels, because they feel that what happens during a character’s development is not important, that other people don’t care either, and that anyone else ’stuck’ in the leveling process (instead of being a r33t endgame raider!!) is not worth talking to or associating with. So, yes, it is a grind NOW for some players… but it didn’t used to be, and if the devs didn’t focus the game as they did it wouldn’t be a grind now.
The same decisions/philosophies that made the game a grind also satisfied various players who were not content with the endgame, so it’s not a black-and-white situation… but my argument, which I obviously cannot get into here for reasons of space, is that you can make a good endgame without making the leveling process feel useless.
*just getting back to the topic lol, WAR’s Battle Points system is ONE example of a system that encourages that open attitude towards both leveling and endgame.
“Is there a grind in the raiding game? Certainly – Karazhan is seen by my entire guild as a grind, since we still need to run it for rewards,”
Same thing as leveling. Anything that isn’t ‘at the top of progression’ becomes a grind since you have to do it to reach that top progression, either because that dependency is necessary to give the top progression meaning or because the devs of a game have failed to design progression where it would not be necessary to do ‘unfun’ things to reach that other point in progression.
In a good game, the experience is the rewards, not the items you get. Especially when the experience is with friends, aka social progression etc. These ‘grinds’ are not inevitable, even when they are easy. And just because they are ‘easy’ does not mean they have to be simple and resistant to doing them better… again, easy to learn but hard to master. Some game mechanics will encourage being ‘hard to master’ much more than others.
“As one example, we know that while PvP servers were more popular at launch, most of those servers dropped dramatically in nightly population and are now, on most servers, less crowded than their PvE counterparts.”
Heh heh… would you believe that one of the Blizzard CMs recently explained their policy of not allowing PvE => PvP transfers using the reason, “many PvP realms are already overpopulated”.
Then a month or so later, they justified the release of a new PvE realm with the reason, “we have more overpopulated PvE realms than PvP realms”.
According to warcraftrealms.com, there are more horde characters on PvP servers than there are on PvE servers… tho ofc, there are also 2x as many Alliance characters on PvE servers than there are on PvP servers.. :P
Your argument is a bit silly, not only because a game company will release new servers to fit demand, but also because WoW ‘world PvP’ nowadays has very little to do with what it used to. As you say, and as countless ;) others have observed, 99% of it is about ganking.
You can’t use a broken system to prove that the original system wasn’t fun.
(otoh, an original system that was fun isn’t one that can’t be improved….)
#10 by Taemojitsu on March 16th, 2008
Edit: just to bring the PvP thread back to relevance, it’s because Sheepherder reminded everyone that good PvP content can fill in gaps between introduction of new and exciting and fun PvE content, so that devs of a game can focus on QUALITY PvE content that is fun instead of inferior PvE content that is a grind. So then we discuss whether having fun PvP content is even possible, heh~
#11 by Taemojitsu on March 16th, 2008
I fear I am posting too much in a thread I said it wasn’t worth posting in anymore.. :( But I wanted to make an example of content that is ‘easy to learn but hard to master’: the pulls of 3-4 humanoids, or 3 + ghost, with numerous patrols in the pre-Rattlegore section of Scholomance.
Patrols are not hard to deal with. You wait around for them to get into a good spot, then you pull them and annihilate them. However, this takes time.
A pull of 3-4 elites is also not hard to deal with, especially with a bit of crowd-control. However, crowd-control means single-target dps and again, this wastes time.
As a frost mage with an aggressive playstyle, my pulls went like this: put up Ice Barrier and Frost Ward, as well as Dampen and probably Mage Armor (instead of Ice Armor). Maybe wait a few seconds for everyone to recover, also drinking back to full mana myself as my cooldowns recharge. Then… frostbolt on the frostbolt-using caster mob. Polymorph on shadowbolt-using mob, which lands just after the frostbolt hits and all the mobs aggro on me. Rank 1 Frostbolt on the melee ghost mob, which is heading towards me but is the focus-fire target; and/or counterspell the SECOND shadowbolt-using mob (which is casting at me from initial aggro) and R1 frostbolt it so I can kite.
Then help kill the ghost which is the focus-fire target, making sure to use R1 Arcane Explosion when it breaks up into illusions, while I tank the frostbolt-using mob and kite the caster around, using Frost Nova/Frostbite shatter synergy with Cone of Cold between the main dps mob and any mobs I’m kiting for maximum aoe dps in between instants and Frostbolt. Add in an extra patrol here to pick up and kite around and making sure to renew frost ward/ice barrier and counterspell when it’s up and re-polying, and you have the typical pull :P
That is the hard way. The easy way is to let the tank aggro the mobs, poly after he or she does so, and then spam frostbolt on the focus target until it dies.
So like I said, just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s a grind, and doesn’t mean players will want to use RMT to get past it. They won’t if your game is designed properly.
#12 by wumpusbait on March 16th, 2008
“Revolutions are always verbose. ”
-Leon Trotsky
#13 by n4omi?? on March 16th, 2008
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move”….
Douglas Adams
#14 by No.6 on March 17th, 2008
Strange. Most of this thread seems to revolve around the premise that there is really only One True Way to make online world-game things and if the Way is discovered than everyone will play the Right Game.
“In a good game, …” “… a FUN game …” yes, everyone knows that the best game for everyone is. If you could only beat everyone else over the head until they realize that You Are Right.
Instead what is happening is that people are offering products for sale and the people who like the offering will choose it.
You want to offer a game with RMT in the interest of choice? Do it. Want to offer a game where you attempt to squelch RMT in the interest of game qua game? Do it. PvP or ‘carebear,’ ‘hardcore’ grind or casually easy? Make the game you want. People will subscribe or they will not – and some may do so for reasons that are not yours, the developer’s.
Try and remember that even with an market of a couple billion a year in MMOGs, in the great scale of things, this whole genre is a blip. No, you are not effecting the betterment of the Chinese poor, creating social justice, righting wrongs, creating the new society, realizing the objectivist dream, or whatever your own sociopolitical views tell you is a worthy goal.
You’re making a form of entertainment. I’m glad that people in the game industry are passionate about their work because dull people make dull games, but don’t fall prey to the illusion that because your work is interesting that it is therefore a significant factor in improving the human condition.
#15 by fleeep on March 17th, 2008
Readers of this thread might be interested in reading SXSW: Human and Property Rights in Virtual Worlds, an article covering a panel discussion of these topics.
#16 by Michael on March 17th, 2008
Things I eagerly await:
1) The final collapse of Second Life and server shutdown
2) The tell-all book on the final collapse of Second Life
3) Company write-downs on Second Life ‘investments’
4) Prokofy Neva playing WoW as a Blood Elf Druid on a PvP server
#17 by n4omi?? on March 17th, 2008
“4) Prokofy Neva playing WoW as a Blood Elf Druid on a PvP server”
I’m thinking she would be a lot happier as a nelf hunter…….
She could then spend her time on the official forums, making long, incoherent posts about being ineffective in pvp, and the Marxist conspiracy behind BoP gear..
Although, coming from second life, she would probably prefer vanguard, as both had a lot of good ideas behind them, but neither seem to work very well..
#18 by fleeep on March 17th, 2008
Do you guys have any sense of all of the things happening in Second Life, or are you just having knee-jerk reactions? There are hundreds of universities holding classes or exploring the possibilities for teaching and research, there are entrepreneurs from all over the world creating and selling digital content, there are artists creating the most imaginative and interactive/reflexive sculptures, live musicians performing for audiences in other countries..
Why would you wish it to fail? If it isn’t your cup of tea, ok, no problem. WoW bored me to tears after a few years, but that doesn’t mean I want it to fall over go boom.
It’s these kinds of petty comments that turn what could be an interesting conversation into something else altogether less interesting.
#19 by Makaze on March 17th, 2008
A lot of it has to do with how over-hyped Second Life is/was. The subscriber numbers and technical quality are low when compared to the amount of press it receives. Also it was the “in” thing therefore right after that it becomes the “in” thing to bash it.
Some people view it as similar to the .com boom. Long on promise of revolutionizing everything, short on delivery. Some of the things you mention have as much chance of really succeeding as pets.com. They see the failure as inevitable and just wish it would come already.
Could also be that they just don’t feel the technology is quite up to par yet and are waiting for something better.
Some individuals hate the self-righteous attitude that prominent members of Second Life always seem to come with and so associate that with the world as a whole.
Others think it might royally fuck up virtual worlds in general by being a sparking point for a court case that ends up ruining or at least seriously changing things for the worse by bringing in restrictive real world laws and or taxation.
And lastly some are just dicks
#20 by Taemojitsu on March 17th, 2008
“People will subscribe or they will not – and some may do so for reasons that are not yours, the developer’s.”
I would say most of these factors have to do with the ‘exploring’ subtype in the four-player categorization scheme.
Exploring doesn’t really require progression, and therefore doesn’t lead to RMT.
And tbh, this is only because many devs do not understand the exploring mindset, therefore they do not design for (or deliberately [i]refrain[/i] from designing for… an apparent contradiction but not really) these types of players.
For someone with your overall perspective tho, what it really comes down to is this: a game that is fun for everyone will sell better. A game that is fun for a certain player at higher levels of progression should therefore (if you know what you’re doing) also be fun for the same player at lower levels of progression. Saying that ‘zomg, not everyone plays games, how can you predict why people will play’ is either ignorant or disingenuous.
“4) Prokofy Neva playing WoW as a Blood Elf Druid on a PvP server”
Do you mean BE priest? I hear [i]female[/i] BE priests especially get ganked a lot.. don’t really want to speculate why
#21 by Glen Colby on March 17th, 2008
Long time reader, first time poster….
was it me or was prfky usng the chewbacca defense from southpark?
#22 by Prokofy Neva on March 17th, 2008
>A lot of it has to do with how over-hyped Second Life is/was. The subscriber numbers and technical quality are low when compared to the amount of press it receives. Also it was the “in” thing therefore right after that it becomes the “in” thing to bash it.
[...]
>And lastly some are just dicks
Or, it could all be the reverse of what you say, and you don’t know, do you? lol
#23 by n4omi?? on March 17th, 2008
“>A lot of it has to do with how over-hyped Second Life is/was. The subscriber numbers and technical quality are low when compared to the amount of press it receives. Also it was the “in” thing therefore right after that it becomes the “in” thing to bash it.
[…]
>And lastly some are just dicks
Or, it could all be the reverse of what you say, and you don’t know, do you? lol”
Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I’m a lawyer defending a major record company, and I’m talkin’ about Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you’re in that jury room deliberatin’ and conjugatin’ the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.
(lol)
(putting “lol” at the end of your statement is a sign of your worldly disdain of the intellectual trivialities of those that disagree with you….just ask my little sister… )
(and <3 to “Glen Colby”, as i thought i was the only one who noticed that….)
<—working for the communists…they pay me to flame you (does that make me a capitalist?)
#24 by Taemojitsu on March 17th, 2008
The ‘cut and thrust’ of debate (better than PvP in most games nowadays!!)… we are all addicted. :(
Did this thread have a point, I forgot
#25 by n4omi?? on March 17th, 2008
“Did this thread have a point, I forgot”
yeah…..it did…to paraphrase….
Pseudo intellectuals make bad video games, soccer moms should be banned from online gaming, some round-eye pundit is a communist, second life is all about furies and pedophiles, horde owns alliance, Prokofy Neva wishes s/he was William Burroughs, and internetz arguments are fun?
#26 by No.6 on March 18th, 2008
Taemojutsu wrote:
“a game that is fun for everyone will sell better.”
I guess you either missed my point or stridently disagree with it – my point is that there is no such beast.
E.g., A well-designed FPS game will sell better than a poor one, but many people don’t like FPS and aren’t buying one at any cost.
Nobody can attract every customer. Success is identifying the customers you’re aiming for and producing the best product for them.
It is not a failure to choose to serve a smaller market intentionally. (For instance, Aces High serves a small flight-sim community of a few thousand and HTC makes a good living at it). Failure is expecting a large audience and attracting a small one.
Some games are well-designed and popular but still don’t attract *everyone*. For instance, I have zero interest in WoW, but obviously it’s silly for me to berate Blizzard for not making the game I want; they’re doing just fine making the game their customers want.
As for the Bartle thing: if it’s useful to the design you’re approaching, use it. As with all categories of anything, the tendency is to shoehorn new experiences into the old model, which is mistaking the model for the reality (zen parable finger and moon thing).
#27 by Taemojitsu on March 18th, 2008
A game that is fun for everyone that plays it will sell better.
Fixed, happy? Rest of argument is the same.
#28 by Jason on March 18th, 2008
That also cannot happen, because you will always have people who insist on playing games that clearly are not designed such that they will have fun with it, and will insist that the game be changed so that they will have fun.
Make a casual leveling fantasy orc-killer MMO? There will be hardcore players who play your game and vocally demand that you add raid content because this casual crap is boring.
Make a hardcord PvP game? There will be people who insist you need to add PvE elements to make the game fun.
There will always be people who are hellbent on going against the flow.
#29 by Taemojitsu on March 18th, 2008
doesn’t mean they have a reason to use RMT.
and again, you’re getting into the whole realm of ‘a game that I might not enjoy fully, but all my friends can enjoy so that makes it worth it’… :P I don’t think anyone who seriously plays MMOs would have any reason to object to a game that DID have raiding, casual play, and PvP all in the same game.
That’s what WoW was like in the beginning after all, and why it became so successful… it still satisifies people who like all of those game types, but only a subset of people because of the emphasis on short-term item rewards instead of long-term story rewards and the complete inability of the devs to understand world PvP.
from an objective perspective, there are really only two things you can do at endgame, that you can’t do otherwise: raiding and PvP. The game motivations involved in both of these can be broken down into stuff like social/organizational challenges in the case of raiding, and social/competitive/’imposer’ motivations in the case of PvP. Neither of these motivation foci really require endgame at all… doing a 5-man instance in an MMO at 5 levels below the ’standard’ level is at least as hard as raiding, at least at the individual level not the organizational/leadership/’deal with lots of stupid people’ level; and PvP of course is fun at any level against a worthy opponent.
The only reason PvP becomes unfun at lower levels is because of level/gear imbalance and the effect that has on the perception of the ability to ‘win’. This can easily be accounted for with good design, making lowbie PvP, even against higher-level players, fun. You just have to understand PvP… which a lot of devs, including the esteemed Mr Bartle, really don’t.
The sucky thing is that even if they understand PvP, such as I’m sure the WAR devs (or at least some of them.. right?!) do, that doesn’t mean they’ll know how to design a game which works around the psychological landscape/assumptions that PvP is built on. Even someone with good intentions can fail, for a given definition of fail.
#30 by No.6 on March 19th, 2008
Well that’s cart before horse as usually retailers prefer that you buy the game before playing it and not vice versa, but OK.
The only thing I was opposing, which Profoky espoused, was the idea that there was one best type of game (in her opinion, open-world sandbox games) which everyone *ought* to like – and others opposed this argument by supporting their preferred type of game. This is silly and much of this thread seemed to be like two people arguing about Coke vs. Pepsi and then being stunned to see someone with a beer. :p