Ironically, those voices were the same people who happily handed Tan money for the credits I provided. Happily handed me stacks of cash for Jedi accounts. Did I help in the demise of SWG? Yes. That is something I accepted long ago. The game that I loved so much, I helped to destroy

I’ve had nagging doubts because the MMO isn’t where I want it to be. It doesn’t feel quite “there.” You know the secret sauce that would take it from being a wacky EQ1-era game into its own unique thing? There’s not enough of that sauce.

If I was making this game the normal way you make games, what I would focus on now is combat innovation. I’ve got pretty typical classic MMO combat at the moment.

MMOClash reports a financial analyst downgraded Activision Blizzard stock from "buy" to "neutral" based on an online survey with 381 gamer participants. Now personally I wouldn't buy Activision Blizzard shares; their main cash cow is aging, and the games business is extremely volatile. But I do have doubts whether accurate financial forecasts can be achieved by asking a few hundred gamers.

Ein Spiel braucht interaktive Momente, um seiner Definition gerecht zu werden. Die Erzeugung eines Spielsystems aber, eines Agierens in mathematischen Möglichkeiten also, ist eine sehr abstrakte Angelegenheit. Um die Einstiegshürden zu senken, die Befremdnis zu verringern und damit massenkompatibler zu werden, muss es sich an bekannte Medien anschmiegen und Gekanntes, Geschätztes und Verstandenes übernehmen. Was liegt da näher, als das Medium Film in das Computerspiel einzubauen. Leider verträgt sich die sekündlich getimte und perspektivisch eingeschränkte Form des Filmes nicht sonderlich gut mit dem auf Freiheit und interaktiver Errechnung scheinbar zufälliger Ereignisse getrimmten Wesen eines Spieles.

I’m a big fan of your work and reader of your blog. You probably don’t remember me but I briefly met you at GDC Online last year. I was looking for Dr. Richard Bartle, who I did find and conducted an interview with.
A few months ago I released the interview on my Youtube Partner account but forgot to mention to you that I had done so. I thought you might be interested in it.

Syp chimes in on the SWTOR morality debate with a very optimistic comment: "Plus, wouldn’t it be really cool if BioWare makes these choices and stories so compelling that it tears people away from grinding light/darkside points to do what they want to do?" Yes, Syp, that would be really cool. But, from my personal experience with gamers and developers, that isn't going to happen.

A "perfect" story for me would be one in which good and evil are so perfectly balanced that my natural choices would end me up somewhere in the grey area of the morality spectrum. That is where I see most people in real life ending up if judged by a jedi system of beliefs. I certainly am no un-emotional jedi of pure goodness and control over mind and body.

Unless Bioware adds grey morality gear to the game, which isn't planned, and frankly unlikely, following a grey story will disqualify players from wearing any morality gear. And I expect there to be some very cool morality gear which you can only wear if you are at the extreme ends of the scale. 99 out of 100 gamers will thus go into "let's optimize the fun out of this" mode. They won't even *read* the possible responses to some moral dilemma. They'll just automatically chose the one which is marked as giving the right points for the cool gear they are after. And that is where the story-based MMORPG gameplay will utterly fail.

This was my talk delivered yesterday at Casual Connect Seattle — somewhat shorter than my usual, as it was a 25 minute slot. The topic was designing for games-as-a-service; a lot of folks are migrating from casual games into social games right now, and need to know more about what the design best practices are.
I ended up reaching back to the Laws of Online World Design and many other older materials both mine and of others, on the grounds that it was likely to be new and perhaps educational for many who have been doing fire-and-forget software in the casual space.
I am fairly sure that the conference will be posting video of the presentation — they normally do — so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, here’s the deck in a few formats

WoW Should Have Died

Let me put it another way: our industry’s “common sense” tells us that WoW should have flopped when it launched. It was the most expensive launch fiasco we’d ever seen!

Common sense says you don’t recover from mega-sized technical disasters. As evidence, we have a long slew of failed games before and after WoW, which we write off as “Oh, of course they failed, their launch was poor.” We still believe that getting the launch right is critically important to a AAA-level MMO’s success.

So how is the view from way up here? It’s great actually -- we’re really happy with how Cataclysm is going so far, and we have big surprises on the horizon. On the other hand, there are details you can see at ground level that you can’t make out from 10,000 feet.

When we started these blogs, the idea was to foster developer communication to the players without some of the inherent problems of posting in forums. Some players have pointed out recently, and we totally agree, that the blogs up until now have been from a very high vantage point. We looked for topics with universal interest that would feel important and newsworthy. That has worked overall, but we also feel like we’ve lost something from when I used to be down in the metaphorical trenches talking to players in the forums.

MUD: Messrs Bartle and Trubshaw's Astonishing Contrivance by Bartle, Richard (GDC Online 2010)

OK. It’s Friday night and I admit I’ve had a drink or possibly two already, which means that I’m in a mood for talking and sharing, possibly more than I normally would. But sharing is a bit of the point of blogging, isn't it?

There won't be any pretence or cover-up. This is the truth, the reality the way it is, including cracks and less-than-perfect. But even if this post starts in misery, I assure you it will get much better towards the end. Don’t worry. Just have a seat and a pint and relax while I'm sharing my story, OK? And don't forget I love my guild.

Now let's get started, shall we? (Larísa fills a pint to the brim and heads for her favorite armchair, takes a sip and clears her throat before speaking up.)

Eyewitness Accounts of MMO Hacks, Griefs, and Cheats on a Grand Scale
Put enough people in one place and sooner or later someone will test the boundaries. MMORPGs are no exception. Ranging from the hilariously frivolous to the monetarily disastrous, here are five stories of player-fueled negativity that have made an indelible mark on massively multiplayer gaming, plus a bonus interview of gamers taking extraordary steps to restore one MMORPG to its former glory.

The Assassination of Lord British

Within the MMOG industry there are two primary server structures employed to house the player base: Separated shards of some sort (typically referred to as 'servers' though this is misleading from a hardware standpoint) and a more unified, single-world structure. Primary examples of each are World of Warcraft, which employs a shard-based structure that breaks its considerable population into separate worlds, and EVE Online which houses its entire player base in a single universe.

On paper, it sounds like business suicide. Offer up the core of your gameworld and a wealth of its content for free, to anyone willing to give it a taste test. Its roots are in the ’90s, an extension of the razor blades business model, emerging in gaming from the need to combat piracy in certain territories. It found its way into the west most memorably in Jagex’s RuneScape, an MMORPG that launched, completely free for registrants, in 2001. Free-to-play is a draw for one big reason: the numbers add up.