As for playing with people, well, you might think about playing on the RP servers and finding a good RP guild. I can’t vouch for WOW in this respect because that wasn’t how I played it, but I stuck with an RP guild throughout the time I played Anarchy Online. These were players who were more interesting in exploring the game world together and discovering the stories of the people who lived in it than simply gaining levels and getting drops. I’m sure that there are people like that in other games if you just take the time to look for them.

The bit about dynamic content being all the rage is super interesting. I still can’t believe how easy MMOs have become, but it was necessary for a mainstream attraction (for better or for worse?). Since first writing this I’ve spent a lot more time on Warhammer and it became a lot more enjoyable for a time, but eventually it became exactly what I thought it would, so I’m done for now.

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Wan, with all due respect that’s not much of a solution, lol. As I was saying, I don’t know that I blame the players or the design of the games, but even if I avoided looking stuff up myself, that won’t change the fact that the game designers still cannot offer great rewards or retain rarity for DISCOVERY in the game. Take a game like Morrowind, where some of the most powerful items could be found by just knowing where to look. Now if I had read a strategy guide and found everything, of course I would know I was spoiling it for myself. But in an MMO, there’s no way they could tuck great items just sitting in a cave in a less-traveled field; they’d be selling for pennies on whatever auction channel by the end of the day.

I understand that you’re asking me not to worry about how everybody else plays the game, but I can’t justify playing any of these alone. The game mechanics themselves are just subpar to me compared to true single-player RPGs (which I almost never play anyway because of no multiplayer) and for good reason — they’re made to be social! There’s no way I can encourage people to play these games alone instead of upbraiding what I think aren’t just problems, but bad trends.

I also miss the concept of Dynamic Content that UO once had in beta. For instance the Virtual Ecology meant that if players overhunted deer then we would have to defend the towns from Dragons attacking due to starvation. It made for a far more interesting game than the scripted events we now live in. At one time dynamic content was the buzz word. Now the buzz word seems to be “easy breezy brainless”

Doomy, tabletop games always seemed strangely cool to me, but there are too many obstacles to getting that together. But you’re basically right, and in fact taking a tabletop intimacy and cooperation and incorporating it into a video game presentation is the best way to explain what I’m yearning for. But for one, people want instant gratification from games (and who can blame them) plus tabletop games don’t have the best reputations. I purposely didn’t mention game-masters in this article because it’s something I want to touch on separately later, but it is integral to this.

I had no idea Second Life even had combat, but you’re saying there are totally different systems of how combat works?

Second Life as a meeting place, as you called it, is probably the way it’s meant to be taken. These types of games are starving in their social networking quality because of people who jump from non-social games like first-person-shooters right to MMORPGs just to head into their pvp/pk competition. Which I guess further worries me that it’s not the games with the problem, it’s the players.

A comment about your section on innovation re modes of PvP: I think the word you’re looking for isn’t resurrected but zombified, though that is my Christianity side talking there. I’ve always seen resurrection as something indicating a glorified raising from the dead, not something as annoying cropping back up.

SecondLife offered personal housing that you could go to, and while I think it’s a novel concept that not everyone gets awesome housing, and some people instead have land on which others can meet and hang out, the COMBAT is a bit unrefined, mostly because there are multiple systems to work with and some cost money and none of them work with each other; sometimes different VERSIONS do not work with each other. Still more disappointing is that items is a very tricky matter- how do you make gear that people can wear to increase their stats? Right now, I don’t see systems that can handle it aside from guns, and thus I run around with free weapons and animations that make it look like I attack even when I do not. Then again, I don’t see SecondLife as a game but as a meeting place, but I know others who do see it as a roleplaying game. (With my sub-interests, it’s hard to find places that aren’t dominated by idiots)

It was a very exciting concept to me, but unfortunately my boss was never on. Hardly anyone else was either.

MrAdventure