Until other developers learn that turning over control of such things to your players creates a type of limitless gameplay, we won’t see many other (or any other) games go this way.

Our next game, Primordiax, has the same philosophy. So stay tuned!

I have a dream. You’re reminding me of it, and the most important part of it is the notion that players running everything would be far more exciting. Guilds have long been the subject of many of my gaming woes. They don’t serve the same function as their historical counterparts, and they tend to be very small- even raiding guilds tend to be fairly small -If you know of many guilds that have 50+ active members at the level cap lemme know. There’s lots of room for improvement in guild organization.

Leveling up by its very nature makes content obsolete. To get away from the “you’re at level 60 now. everything beneath you is trivial and worthless” I think that we would have to go so far as to step away from a leveling system. EVE does this (albeit without conserving the amount of content that I suggest needs conserving), but also has a disturbingly high amount of social stratification- and, in fact, no upwards mobility for the new guy. We want to avoid that too.

I don’t know that there’s an easy answer. Will people play a game where more time spent does not equal more power for themselves? In MMOs players will often do nothing that does not benefit them in some way. A truly dynamic reputation system (instead of “player ratings” (think pvp) and levels/personal wealth) that rewards teamwork could potentially turn things around for the genre and keep us from wasting even more virtual space.

You need to give players functional items, locations with a lot of character to attract people (grand waterfalls in front of glistening pools of water, that do NOT have aggro mobs all over it), and role play oriented commands so they can actually do events. The role play crowd has begged for things for years and they are rarely ever thrown a bone.

Worst of all, the complete disregard for any kind of player run content (other than PvP) barely even gets mentioned.

Someone smart is going to put a lot of effort into this sort of thing and score themselves a huge, fiercely loyal player base.

Tobold has more problems with healing becoming mindless area healing spam, something that bored my DPSing warlock, as the most effective spell was the AoE Rain of Fire for every group with more than 1 mob… so basically everything…^^

I do not blame the players, I again blame the system that is based on pure individual loot/level/reputation grind.

I totally support your idea to give players system where they can participate and influence things. The dynamic world that I imagined would not work for WoW and its hundreds of servers. Even in an environment with only one world/servercluster, basically Guild Wars or EVE, there would be problems. I think it would be worthwhile for companies that could probably afford it to think about ways how they could make their world more dynamic, add more unique fun events and all that.

A very basic example of a yearly event, nice idea but flawed in the end:

Guild Wars has the Wintersday events. You can vote for the God of Ice/Winter, Grenth, or the Goddess of Life/Spring, Dwayna. They fight each other in different districts, and different rewards spawn depending on which deity won this district.

After the end of the event they simply count the number of districts Grenth won versus the ones that favored Dwayna, and either winter gets extended by one week or it becomes spring.

A very nice idea, but in the end nobody cares who wins. Guild Wars is full of interesting ideas, but their implementation is quite often rather clumsy.

Maybe Blizzard is already copying and testing ideas of all other MMOs in the making to polish them up and reap the rewards in their very own next generation MMO?

The big problem with the ever changing world is it takes enormous money to generate all that content. I think the better way to go is create as many organizations, groups, and systems that players can run, control, and change. The social structures can be very interesting and they can change radically without needing huge art and animation investments.

World changes are great too, but they have to come along at the pace they can be afforded.

I remember when I first learned of MMOs, thinking that a living, breathing world would be absolutely brilliant. The current reality of a DIKU loot treadmill is basically just a giant multiplayer JRPG. That’s OK, but it’s nowhere near what I was hoping for the genre.

While we’re writing about story in MMOs, I can’t help but think that Bioware’s entry into the field is absolutely idiotic. They excel at telling great stories, but the MMO genre isn’t the right place for that. They should be spending their time and money making more great single player games, not trying to shoehorn their talents into the tired old MMO field.

My crystal ball may be cloudy and grumpy, but I just can’t see them doing more than pulling a FunCom or EA in the field (hopefully not a Tabula Rasa). Another expensive mistake borne of the MMO addiction, rather than focusing on core competency and appropriately designing for the audience.

http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2009/03/has-healing-changed.html

Basically, about making your own gameplay mechanics obsolete. One more reasons why I pray for salvation, WoW is at the point where they did it right and enticed millions of people, now they are living from their reputation and produce a pile of dung.

Tesh has an interesting idea of a world of cycles, I have a similar idea: A world of permanent progression.

There would be some fixed dungeons, but the world would be dynamic. Dungeons would change every other major patch, some would get removed, some remodeled. The world map would change. Depending on the actions of players, Atlantis will sink or not…

This gives players the power to change an ongoing, developing story. Shape the history of their world.

The current mindset is to keep everything static: But the exciting moments of the Ahn-Qiraji opening event are gone, never to be repeated. Dire Maul and Maraudon are obsolete dungeons. Rotten old content.

I can imagine a world were levels do not make content obsolete, basically a world without levels. A world with changing dungeons, environment.

Every half year a new campaign, that can take place in old areas of the world, not just the continent added with the latest expansion. Half a year of fighting back a plague, half a year to fight against the undead, half a year of civil war between two major cities.

The drawback would be that players can miss out, who joined later cannot participate in events that happened long ago, sure. But I like the dynamic world aspect a lot.

Woe be it for me to tell Blizzard they are doing something wrong, but this is a pretty elaborate way of turning an MMO into a glorified single player game.

What is the point of playing in a virtual world is everywhere you do people are living in their own Matrix-like dream world? How are you supposed to help people with things, have shared experiences (sometimes positive, sometimes negative), and the like?

And why in the hell would they spend enormous development time on this concept, when there are things like player housing still WOEFULLY lacking from WOW? This makes no sense. This sounds like the brain child of some technie who moved up too far and had too much power to be told “no!”