I mean, a game about tiptoeing through the most tulips just isn’t going to be too exciting, nor rewarding.

I don’t mean this as picking on you, but usually telling others what they will or won’t find exciting or rewarding isn’t a good idea.

There was a video linked to on this site a while ago about, of all things, spaghetti sauce, and about how Prego came to claim the market from then-leader Ragu by recognizing that people had different tastes: there wasn’t one perfect spaghetti sauce that was going to win the market by being the best, instead some people liked certain aspects of a sauce that others didn’t. Some wanted large chunks (and others didn’t care), some wanted a spicier sauce, and some wanted garlic. By making sauces that followed these broad trends in desire rather than assuming there was one perfect sauce, they not only claimed the market but led to the entire movement toward taste varieties in commercial foods.

It’s highly germaine to this sort of discussion. Some people do like harsh penalties for death as a “flavor”, some prefer a more difficult or taxing character advancement, some prefer crafting to adventuring, etc. But assuming that what you like is universal I think is risky.

Anyway, does anyone still have the link to that video?

There are a lot of good memories of corpse runs, just as there have been really annoying corpse runs that people have hated. It’s not enough to make them optional, it seems. DAOC removed gear loss, but kept XP loss, and a corpse run meant you could reclaim some of that lost XP. For me, that meant doing corpse runs because that’s “the way it’s done,” that’s what’s expected when you die. But it’s really not that big of a deal. They could have removed that XP-reclaiming mechanic, and it wouldn’t have made that much of a difference to me.

And then there’s UO and AC, where corpse runs were rather optional because you didn’t lose too much. Again, that’s just from my perspective, because I didn’t mind losing a couple things in AC, and I always had backup gear in UO. My comrades were often confused when I didn’t insist on a corpse run after every death. Maybe deep down, they expected corpse runs because they secretly enjoyed them.

What is that something else? Is it really impossible to find meaning in communal activity that isn’t a blow back against the system, be it other players, or corpse runs, or time sinks, or whatever, running the risk of ruining your day (or gameplay session really)? Do we really need to rely on negative situations to generate meaning? Do we?

Well…yeahah.

I mean, a game about tiptoeing through the most tulips just isn’t going to be too exciting, nor rewarding.

I think we can do with less corpse runs and less open world pvp and more Stories about Trees.

You seem to have forgotten that the Story of a Tree was about a supposed player’s death and the community’s bonding through their mourning of it. Do try again; there is hardly a dearth to choose from.

Here, try this:

http://goofball.nytimes-se.com/2009/07/04/recruiting-tool-cancelled/

Go play some smaller games with tighter more intimate communities. They still exist.

But never expect another UO. You’re never going to see it, because people have something that they didn’t before… the choice to leave at the very start. So if you want games to have meaning, you need to look for a different sort of meaning, or you need to accept a really tiny (comparatively speaking anyway) player base. You won’t find meaning in fighting against forces that make the game much less fun to play for the people that they’re being directed at, because there’s no force holding people in those worlds anymore. There are options now. So you need something else to bring people together.

What is that something else? Is it really impossible to find meaning in communal activity that isn’t a blow back against the system, be it other players, or corpse runs, or time sinks, or whatever, running the risk of ruining your day (or gameplay session really)? Do we really need to rely on negative situations to generate meaning? Do we?

I don’t think we do. I think we can build something that rewards a bunch of people getting together and working for the common good of the community in way that we’re not, and I think we can do it without relying on making people have a worse time if they don’t. I think we can turn away from bonds forged out of frustration and turn them into bonds forged out of building something, together, that endures and surpasses the individual. I think we can do with less corpse runs and less open world pvp and more Stories about Trees. Except rather than memorials to the passing of a beloved player, we’re talking monuments to the excellence of the current players. I think we can build with positive reinforcement, not negative reinforcement.

And I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying it’s possible, and that it’s better in the long run.

Seriously, there was emotion, need, and desire to crush your enemies and hear the lamentations of their women (AoC should have been made more like UO, and not a level grind. They ruined the ideal’s of Robert E. Howard from the get-go). There was also great celebration, wine and dance, feasts, and parties. And it meant something, most of it not about beating enemies.

I miss that. I’m human, not a bot. The sanitized games like WoW are so lacking in the social spheres.

It’s not as tense, sure. But is tension the only way we can make the event meaningful? If the badger is really hard to beat, and it takes 40 tries, finally beating him is pretty satisfying, yeah? You get that “I finally solved the puzzle!” type rush. And you don’t need to do it via fear.

Granted, this does take a very different approach to content. And it does mean that you have to manage frustration at getting gated on content much more carefully, since that equation being out of balance becomes more of an issue, where fear of death is a much more generic thing. But I think that, if the fights are fair, and the player has the sense that the reason they lost was because they personally made a mistake, but they see a way to correct it, then frustration is less of an issue.

Corpse runs in UO suck. They suck less so because a lot of the sting was removed by making them more optional. If the reason why they suck less is because you can ignore them more often to a degree, what does that say?

If we want to build communities, perhaps we can find ways that give incentives based on positive experiences, rather than force them based on necessity due to having to deal with negative experiences? Sure, you probably won’t develop bonds quite as strongly in terms of the in game community, but you’ll have a bigger community to form bonds with.

As to your last point, you end up having to pick your friends based on skill, because anyone that thinks anyone can play a game like WoW at the high end hasn’t played a game like WoW at the high end… As a reference, I’d much rather have an NPC in my group in Guild Wars than I would most of the other players I’ve run into with pick up groups. Most of the time the AI does a better job, and the AI is pretty dumb and used to do things like stand in lava until they gave us the ability to tell them not to. But at least it doesn’t do stupid things like over pull, not pay enough attention to the party health bars, or ignore the monk that’s keeping them all alive while he gets surrounded by mobs -_-. I don’t necessarily think that skill is the greatest thing to end up having to use as a metric, since it increases the potential of severe interpersonal issues, but there is a metric, even if it’s not an ideal one.

You can make it a little closer to ideal by turning “skill” into responsibility, and there are a lot of ways to design systems that benefit from relationships where players are given opportunities to, but are not forced to, give aid to each other at a mild detriment to themselves (say they level slower), but at a net benefit to the group (helping out increases the content you’ll be able to go through later, and the ease at which you can do so, because now you’ve got extra benefits when you’re working with your buddies), and in those situations, the giving of aid becomes a metric for whether you can rely on the person.

Sure, you lose the crucible of being able to bond with other people in a very difficult situation, but arguably, that crucible’s already been lost. Because EQ is no longer the only Diku on the market, and because UO is no longer the only MMOG on the market, the sort of insanely frustrating experiences that those games used to bring people together no longer function. Instead of sticking with it, people are more apt to leave; there are more friendly places to be. So can no longer resort to unfriendliness as the basis for which you forge bonds of community among your playerbase. Those days are dead and gone. Instead you need to turn to something that works in the opposite direction, something built out of generating incentive for altruism and using that as the basis of your community rather than generating community through shared suffering and difficulty. It’s much harder, the bonds will likely be weaker, but that’s the best you’re going to get. The market won’t be able to bear a large scale niche product at the level of polish and scope that WoW has demanded all such games bring to the table from now on.

And if you’re fine with small scale, there are a lot of active muds left, and I’m sure there’ll be some nice things that come out of a lot of these world building start ups like Metaplace.

Let’s take UO for example. I never had a problem with corpse runs, until the introduction of the Age of Shadows expansion and the increased emphasis on items. Insurance replaced corpse runs with monetary loss as the deterrant, and that just sucks. I think in it’s current form, if insurance were removed but items left highly valuable, corpse runs in UO would become way too punishing. This is actually something I’ve been sort of working on fixing on my gray shard, and it’s actually meeting with some resistance. Thread here. Basically the effect of my solution is making corpse runs backwards. The run is from where you die to the nearest healer, with little to no gear loss.

Items in UO – in it’s current state – are far from disposable, a design decision I never liked, because it obliterated my favorite playstyle, the thief. Stealing abundant Vanq weapons was always acceptable, but they’d lose players by the handfuls if thieves could openly steal those items that took millions of gold and several weeks to obtain. I still think there’s a place for item loss in UO, but it’s a very touchy subject.

For item-loss corpse runs to work, I think the items need to be widely available in the first place. The run needs to be optional, something that you can recover from fairly easily if you choose not to do it. It’s optional in WoW, where you choose between running back to your corpse and trying to fight things off, or resurrecting on the spot and taking a 10 minute break and a few gold worth of equipment damage – so, effort vs time/money. Perhaps having a viable alternative is the key to making corpse runs bearable?

winning and losing as long term concepts have nothing to do with the definition of gaming. Harsh consequences for losing especially has nothing to do with what a game is. The mere fact that there is a challenge of any sort with a definable pattern you need to master to complete it is enough.

Ok, I’ll give you that, in a “Paint-by-Numbers” sort of way. And that’s all these MMOs have become.

Harsh death penalties are time sinks and very little more. We can talk about respecting the game world, and there can even be some validity in that, but only if you’re talking simulation and not game first and foremost.

I have to again give you the point here. It’s comparative to sports vs. little-girl-sidewalk-games (tiddlywinks and hopscotch). I mean common, “harsh death penalties”? Harsh would be starting over. Corpse runs are hardly harsh. “Time sink”? The idea of “down time” and it being bad is always something to think about, and I think Raph’s point that UO answered to that hits the mark. Most of the time in UO you had a very short corpse run, and if you failed to get your gear you had plenty more where that came from.
The important part of his point was the social gains to game play. I made new social contacts in UO by both getting help and giving. It was a challenge at times, and added a level of game play that the Paint-By-Numbers games can’t compete with.

And items are just as important as they’ve ever been in a diku, because you can’t level up a few more levels if you don’t have your equipment. The mobs will eat you. Equipment in games like WoW are just as much vambrace shaped levels as they’ve ever been. Losing them means that the content you need to be doing out-levels you. By a lot. That means you lose to it, constantly. Needing to replace them every few levels is because of their importance in the overall design.

There’s nothing stopping you from stocking up extras. With the exception of one of a kind quests designed specifically to give you an item you need to proceed in Paint-By-Number designs.

As to you last point… I have nothing against worldiness, except that I hate the people in those worlds.

But haven’t you met people on the opposite end of that spectrum too? For myself, it’s hard to find people that I feel I “know” in today’s games. I don’t trust anyone because there’s no means to tell if they’re trustworthy, I don’t like anyone for their play style because there’s only one, I don’t admire anyone’s honesty because there’s no dishonest things to do, etc. The best you can hope for is to know what kind of music someone likes, for Christ’s sake.

But in the end, it all does come down to perspective. The arguments you are making are good ones for players who want that kind of game. The one’s I’m making are good ones for those like me. And the same for others posting here. The only problem at all is the lack of quality variety in the MMO scene.