[MUD-Dev] Community feeling (was: To good to be TRUE, in an M MPORPG?)

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Vincent Archer
> According to Koster, Raph:

>> I inherently distrust the concept of virtual apartments, rather
>> than actual houses on the land, because they are less conducive
>> to neighborhoods, in my mind. Less odds of bumping into a
>> neighbor, less odds of seeing a house and getting curious about
>> who lives there, far less ability to express yourself to a
>> passerby and thereby catch their attention.
 
> However, given the fact that their target was about 100k
> subscribers in a single world, can you imagine the urban sprawl
> that 100k+ houses would have made :)
 
Even more than distrusting virtual apartments, I distrust arbitrary
technical or marketing targets made without attention to game design
implications. :)

>> Of course, they also recently announced a feature to actually let
>> you toggle off other players on screen.

> It's not a toggle. To reduce graphical lag in cities (some people
> have taken to nickname Omni-1, the main Omnicorp city,
> Omni-one-frame-per-second) they have introduced a slider that
> allows you to reduce the range at which characters begin to be
> drawn. There's a lower bound; you can't hide every character.

In that case, it's eminently reasonable. Well, as long as the
maximum range for combat is the range at which you can no longer
hide people.

>> I don't think it is bad to wish for greater convenience in these
>> games. I think that you have to be careful how far you
>> go. Certainly thousands of people seem to be enjoying AO very
>> much.

> The good question now is: will they form strong ties in it, and
> remain in the game long, or will the churn rate be high.

And for that we'll have to wait a few months.

-Raph
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