[...] it seems like everyone else is talking about it, so I suppose I will join in while I buy a bit more time delaying the next [...]

[...] Readers who pay attention to commentators writing about MMO design or industry questions at large may be familiar with Raph Koster’s statement: [...]

[...] Diablo 3 was announced, Raph restates the obvious, and I find a correspondence between the two: Diablo was for RPGs a bit what WoW was for MMOs. Take [...]

[...] to some degree to the discussion previously begun on MMOs vs the World. Read on!Quoted from Raph’s Website: As part of the ongoing raking over the coals of Richard Bartle for saying the obvious (yes, [...]

[...] experienced players”. Here are some more links that tie into this very amusing little discussion: http://www.raphkoster.com/2008/06/27/mud-influence/ http://www.moorgard.com/?p=235 http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2008/06/wow.html [...]

[...] own dislikes or that of the marketeers is hard to tell… But in the current discussion about how MMOs have been dropping more MUD features than innovating new features themselves, it regularly comes up to debunk the ‘PvP is hardcore’ myth that surrounds PvP in MMOs. From MUDs [...]

Raph:
I think it’s easy to be dismissive of history, and say that it’s not relevant. I’m pretty sure I have heard a quote somewhere about the consequences of that. Moving forward without knowledge of the past is far more likely to result in going in circles. MMOs have removed more features from MUD gameplay than they have added, when you look at the games in aggregate.

The fact that people can cite things like “big boss battles in a public zone” or “really rich badge profiles and player stat tracking” as truly differentiating features mostly speaks to how narrow the scope of the field has gotten in the public’s mind. This is like arguing over whether scalloped bracing in acoustic guitars is a defining characteristic for all of music, when in fact it has zero relevance to MIDI controllers. By analogy, Bartle, like many of us, is arguing from the perspective of all music — all virtual worlds. And his detractors are people who only listen to indie rock from the Athens, GA, area circa 1989. All Richard is asking for is for someone to please play some jazz.

Just as MMO’s have gone backwards in their own sphere. UO had allot of things that MMO’s have been slowly discarding. Sometimes out of need, other times out of goal.

But the one thing that sticks out to me, over the last years since MMOs came out, is that the players expectations are where to direction and movement is. Yes, players expectations have been funneled by developers too, but it’s still their expectations that the industry is driving to.
And that’s like having the inmates run the asylum.

You can have no leadership where the masses run things.

If anyone is interested in a look at this from inside a game, Dragonrealms is currently having an epic forum-fight over whether or not to cap skills some way, somehow, somewhere.

http://www.play.net/forums/topics.asp?forum=20&category=1

It’s primarily in the second and third “folders”, though it has leaked out a little to other places.

> D&D did have an influence on most of today’s MMOs, it’s just that this influence does not extend to the “MMOness” of them.

I think Cronuss makes a good point.

Maybe I’ve become overly cynical about MMOs today — or maybe not — but I see them as more closely related to D&D than to Tolkien because, like Cronuss, I define today’s “MMOness” as something like “gameplay rules for allowing a player to work with other players to increase the numeric statistics of a character.”

In other words, today’s MMOs seem to me to focus far more on numbers-play (i.e., game) than on story (i.e., world). If there’s story, or a world setting in which a game’s characters live, it’s only there as a backdrop for the numbers-based leveling-up gameplay that’s front-and-center on the stage. That seems much closer to the “rollplaying” mode of D&D than to either the emotion or the deeply-realized setting of Tolkien’s stories. Leveling up seems to be what matters most to MMO gamers, whether they’re playing an elf or an alien or a robot as a character. MMOs in this analysis are basically D&D without the spontaneous human DM-guided storytelling.

I’m not criticizing D&D or similar RPGs here; with a good DM I think they could achieve a unique balance of numbers-based gameplay and epic storytelling. What I’m saying is that I think replacing an imaginative human DM with prescripted quests as MMOs do eliminates most of the storytelling, Tolkienesque or otherwise. That leaves MMOs with only the “gotta level up!” numbers-chasing.

It would be interesting to see an MMO designed to enable storytelling to play an equal or larger role than the numbers-chasing part of D&D. Perhaps the next “revolution” in MMOs will be a design that provides storytelling tools to players, allowing some of them to act as DMs for their friends, enabling a deeper roleplaying experience than dinging to Level 70.

Maybe we can call these players “wizzes”… and hello again, MUD1.

I played this MUD many many years ago, and it’s still going pretty strong. There are 600 people on at once in the server and the game is more enjoyable and has more to do than any of the other MMOs out… and I’ve tried about 90% of them.

Anyone interested, I’m talking about Gemstone IV from Simutronics. They also have Dragon Realms.

http://www.gemstone.net

I’m hoping someday we will have an MMO that is more than just grinding mobs and rolling for drops.