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That"s mainly how World of Warcraft "won". No revolution, all evolution, lovingly polished, pruned. No Vision? to meddle: if it"s not really fun for most, redo it.

It"s kind of hard to answer. Because I"d rather have multiple core basic features working, not just 1 Player housing. A housing that integrates well with gameplay, and contributes meaningfully to it. Almost every modern MMO integrated player housing after the fact, which means it wasn"t an...

Usual complain: doesn"t work with euro players.

I have to agree with Fog. Liberalism isn"t by definition The Unknown or Change. It has been usually associated with change, but one does not imply the other. The usual Liberalism vs Conservatism debate is completely tainted. It"s a debate of Orange vs Bright. Sure, you"re talking about light...

It is like that, but 99% of the time, it used as WoW. There are a few quests here and there that auto update, and their objectives change, chiefly "go there", and, as soon as you get there, your objective becomes "now kill X". Not that it"s "hard" to implement. You simply skip the...

That"s essentially the AoC quest engine. You also had LOTRO"s achievement system, which ran as an invisible quest engine (basically, you had all achievements as quests you already had; they just didn"t show up in the quest journal. You even had an interface option to add achievements in the...

I don"t think anyone here is trying to insert a job system in WoW. Not gonna happen (although, with possible "dual spec trees" raised as a possibility at WWI...) We"re talking about an hypothetical game from a non hypothetical company whose name would start with S and end with 8. Right...

Oh, if you remember some of my old arm-chair dev musings (since no one at Nevrax was really interested in my ideas, for all the good that it did to them), I have exactly that. The ultimate "loot-oriented MMO". You have exactly three intrinsic characteristics. Your race, your name and your...

Fine, if you call me a roUGe, I"ll call you Zhen! Eh! Actually, it"s really a roleplay argument. Let"s compare an alt system with a shared bank (in which bound items can be put), and a job system. What"s the difference? Answer: the character name. That"s all. As I said, in a modern PvE game...

Exactly. The biggest problem of a FF-style job system is that, if you want multiple jobs, you need to grind. Period. You can"t quest - you"ve already done the quests. So acquiring experience for a new job requires pure grinding - or enough quest lines in parallel to potentially level every...

or worse, the dire wolf that drops an epic level 50 required axe. Maybe he ate the wielder? My, wolf, what a verrrry large stomach you have... In a different kind, I"m also a big fan of useful loot. What irks me isn"t the rat that drops a rusted claymore. It"s the rat that drops a "mangy rat...

Not an asshole. It"s relatively simple, and something that EQ "knew" very well. Random rewards are far more addictive than fixed rewards. Note that I said "addictive". Not fun. It"s actually funifyou get rewarded. As long as people walk out from the encounter with an equipment upgrade, it"s...

To the best of my knowledge, WoW was the first to open the doors. You had pretty nice "skins" for some of the previous MMOs, but Blizzard went further, and allowed people to completely access the UI engine. If "The Client is in the hands of the Ennemy", why not let your friends put their hands...

They are a kludge, remember. Originally, you had percentages. The problem of percentages is that they were scaling (or rather, their value remained constant), where everything else went down relative to your level. The Rend trinket with 2% critical hit would have remained one of the most...

Seconded. The only classes that really has a use for Alchemist stones are the mana-chugging classes (read: healers).

Hardcore raiders, no. Experienced players, yes. Thankfully, this is easier in 2008 than it was back in 2000 (At Nevrax, I was the only one who ever played in a MMO. The lead game designer discovered T4C during his time there, and thought it was what MMO should be. Sweated tears - and megabytes...

And you think this is going to stop legislators becoming very interested in this... how?

A lot of people have already said part on my own take on the subject, so I"ll simply summarise: Housing is interesting the following main reasons: - Playing house/legos/whatever, which is a small, but fun, sub-game - Displaying your achievements - Acting as a social hub - Acting as a more...

But that"s the point. If - and that"s the stated goal - you want to go head against WoW, and want to draw 10 million subscribers, then you do have to offer them something they cannot find in WoW. Because, if they find it in WoW, then they are going to be playing WoW when you launch...

That"s a lesson you get from WoW. Transparency helps. The ones who lose by being transparent are the ones who have already lost - in this 21st century"s industry, if you have to sweep your problems under a rug, you will fail. There"s a lot of lessons the industry has to swallow, and it"s...

You sooo much sound like my old producer on Ryzom. Except for the shipped bit part, in 2000, there were very little people having worked in online games yet, and even less in France I"ve heard it already, and I do agree with other views; if you are not believing all of the above, you will...

Not only that, but beat Bioware"s KOTOR online to the punch. Or pray they"re a major failure.

It would work. if Curt can make a WoW clone at 8.99$/month instead of WoW"s current price.

Because of the same usual thing. It"s far easier, and less risky to make a cheap copy of a proven design. You will probably NOT make a million copies, but you will sell some. Fantasy went thru a minor surge of originality 10 years ago, but today, it"s chockfull of regurgitated stereotypes...

You can try. That"s what Curt aims to, anyway. The point of contention is that you are extremely unlikely to succeed. Sure, lots of people around here want him to succeed, but the point is that he"s not likely to. He"s: 1) Entering one of the market with the highest number of entrants...

What strange delays? You mean, the fact that, unlike WoW, you can press an action before the global countdown expires, and the action gets queued, instead of requiring you to spam your keyboard not to miss the end of global cooldown? There"s nothing exotic about LOTRO"s combat system. You...

Actually, IP had everything to do with LOTRO"s moderate success. If you had an exact copy of LOTRO, with all LOTR references ripped, it would have been a sub-50k game or worse.

That worked with classic games. That doesn"t work with subscription-based online games because, quite frankly, a part a small fringe of a couple hundred thousand hard-core gamers, no one is going to pay two subscriptions at the same time. Making a good game that is accessible, fun, and...

I"ve come back to MMO, but the only one that made me come back due to patch was DAoC. I had quit, and I came back for the first expansion. Unfortunately, I quit again (and never came back) after 3 months. I did come back to EQ, and Asheron"s Call, but that was chiefly due to social...

Gandalf used a staff, but he used it "correctly". The Tolkien "mage" staff is a symbol of the position among the five Maiar which is why Gandalf breaks Saruman"s. It is derived from scandinavian tradition, where the population was completely illiterate, and priests used staves engraved with...

Doesn"t work. If your MMORPG is popular and achievement-oriented, those numbers WILL be derived, with a relative degree of precision, by the people interested in numbers. If your clues are imprecise or irrelevant to the results, people will complain that they have no idea how well they"re...

Exactly. And you know exactly why they revamped it? Because their customers were leaving. Shows how much they wanted to PvP, despite being on PvP servers.

Maybe, but the real question asked is: How many of these people wouldn"t have come to WoW if there was zero PvP? Nobody is saying that adding PvP to a PvE-centric game wasn"t good. But WoW is a PvE-centric game first and foremost, and PvP was bolted on it, with all the attendant problems...

Yup. But that"s the important part. Unless you have people with quality in their mind, no matter how much processes and documentation is written, it"s not going to make quality work. As an example, in Alcatel, I was tasked with measuring the code/comment ratio. Quality code means commenting...

Reminds me of 15 years ago, at Alcatel. People were busy preparing for an ISO9001 "Software Quality" audit. So, when they picked a couple people as guinea pigs for when the real auditors came, they - of course - had to pick me. The tester asked me "What"s Quality in software?" My answer: "It...

That"s a bit different, though. Those caves suffered from the usual "lack of content production time" which leads to the same houses copied over and over, or, in your case, the same caves copied over and over again. During beta, there were far more copies. A couple of caves were redone before...

EVE has a good solution to that. The amount of skills required for a given job is finite and relatively bounded. Developping a single character beyond that point opens alternate non-overlapping roles for the same character, making it more flexible, not more powerful. Or, in other words, an...

Guild Wars had a good idea on this. You pick 8 skills/actions in town, and go out with those. Of course, there"s also classes, which interfere with it, so it"s closer to respec at will rather than change classes at will, but that"s a good idea to pursue.

One of the major problem with long quest chains as opposed to wide quest hubs is quest synchronisation. The Epic quests of LOTRO are a good example of this. Everyone is going to be on those quests (or nearly everyone). However, if you want a group for Book 3, chapter 6, you have to find...

Steampunk make a wonderful milieu for a MMO. You don"t have the problem of the "too" high tech which requires your designers to make contrived explanations of exactly why your hero isn"t firing spraying bursts of high penetrating uranium-coated projectiles (or whatever has a higher killrate than...