Comments on: Next gen community relations

By: MMO Round Table :: View topic - 3rd Party Community Sites

MMO Round Table :: View topic - 3rd Party Community Sites — Thu, 31 May 2007 19:01:30 +0000

[...] subject: Just thought I’d point out that Raph just posted a few sold links on "next generation community relations" Some interesting thoughts and links that are right up the alley of this discussion. [...]

By: GigaGamez » Archive WoW 2.0: Lord of the Rings, Everquest Creator Challenge Warcraft «

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 16:05:26 +0000

[...] In other words, MMO meets Web 2.0. (Hat tip: Raph Koster, who has some thoughts on this daring move on his blog.) [...]

By: Greg Short

Greg Short — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 17:38:19 +0000

We recently engineered many of these features in our latest Players service at http://www.vgplayers.com.

These services definitely are a large investment for any MMO developer to do properly, and getting the game team excited about being involved is a definite must.

I’d even go so far as to propose that providing guild websites, blogs, auto-event tracking and other sticky elements is going to be as important as the core game content over the next few years – people want a place to showcase their achievements and hang out with their friends.

By: Allen Sligar

Allen Sligar — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 19:54:23 +0000

even solutions.

I agree and have my own ideas on this but: How so?

By: Morgan Ramsay

Morgan Ramsay — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 07:24:06 +0000

I’m with the others on this in that the web is way under utilized in many MMOs.

That’s partially due to the attitude that MMO games are packaged entertainment goods rather than online entertainment services. That isn’t to say that MMO games aren’t goods. They are goods. The manufacturing business model supports the development of these products; however, MMO games should be marketed as services, even solutions.

By: Kressilac

Kressilac — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 06:46:33 +0000

I’ve always wondered why EQ never allowed the merchants behind the lines of NPCs in Luclin to manage inventory and prices from a web site. Its integration with the web like that, that I see as key to next generation stuff. If the stuff is mundane enough to not require you be online, let it happen “offline” (a.k.a. still Internet connected just not with the 3D graphical client). Hell, web bandwidth is much much much cheaper than the stuff necessary for the game. Game developers feel perfectly comfortable creating a head for the game that is text only for system administration duties but to create a head for the game that is not 3D and put it in the hands of a customer, why that’s insane…. The Web, a set of web services for portal developers… Why continue to restrict the interface that a user uses to access your game when you can expand the reach of your game and save money on infrastructure at the same time?

I’m with the others on this in that the web is waay under utilized in many MMOs.

By: Brinking - Nabeel Hyatt

Brinking - Nabeel Hyatt — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:39:07 +0000

The first MMO to go Web 2.0…

One very surprising thing to note is that these Web 2.0 innovations did not come from the current crop of “casual MMO” folks. For the most part Habbo Hotel, Runescape, and even the recently launched Nicktropolis are still Web 1.0 endeavors — largely…

By: WorldIV » LotRO: MMO 2.0

WorldIV » LotRO: MMO 2.0 — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 03:48:35 +0000

[...] Raph Koster correctly noted that: The interesting thing about leveraging all the contemporary ideas like Wikis, blog pages, and the like, is that they are about user investment in user-owned channels, instead of about getting celebrated by the official channel. As such, they are naturally retentive mechanisms. [...]

By: Darniaq

Darniaq — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 02:19:50 +0000

I always thought Neocron was ahead of the curve. With your character logged into the game world, you could log into their game forums. It’s been years since I’ve checked back. But with just that level of integration, you’ve got private messages, community management within both game AND discussion, ability to push dynamic event-based content, closed-system general account management AND copious data mining techniques from which to choose.

I’ve also found Maplestory (and the other Nexon services) to have a high degree of transparency between “Game” and “everything else”. To support their business models they really do need this of course. But it is something of a vision of the future how robust and integrated their services.

That’s not to slight what Turbine is doing. They are doing some stuff that is fairly unique. However, it’s mostly unique in how wide-reaching the features are. Other games have semi-realtime updated online maps (Shadowbane, Planetside), out-of-game account and character management (EQ2Players), lore- and game-based wikis (ATiTD, WoW) and even minigames (Neopets). But none of them have them all together wrapped in one singular total offering. For that alone, they should get kudos.

By: joshlee

joshlee — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 02:17:23 +0000

It’s cool to see developers doing more to take the ancilliary content that users already produce and bring it within the fold. Hosting the data on your own servers has one more possible advantage: once you’ve got all this knowledge from blogs/wikis/etc. sitting in your databases, you’re only a step away from being able to reformat it and make it accessible from within the client. What’s more fun: to alt-tab out to the browser to look up quest spoilers, or to gaze into your own personal Palantír for fully tagged and searchable advice?