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

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: Vincent Archer [mailto:archer at frmug.org]
 
> 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.

I never got anything like 1 frame a second on full draw detail in
Omni 1.  Well maybe every so often, but then it would lag itself to
death trashing textures in and out of the gfx card for upto 15
seconds at a time.

> But it's still eerie to see people warping in and out of your
> visibility range instead of disappearing at the
> "horizon". Specially if you're used to the "old" method.

The external draw distance is wonderful, I love being able to see
for miles.  Its one of the aspects of the game I really like.
 
> 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.

Well I've already churned out of it :) One of the things that
probably kept me going so long in EQ was the knowledge of the high
end content - I wanted to go and explore the high level dungeons and
battle the dragons. I wanted to have the best equipment in game. I
wanted to be a mighty wizard. There is a complete absence of that
motivation in AO. The absence of quests (as opposed to missions) is
a shame too. It all feels like a flight sim with an auto-mission
generator and I've never liked those as much as games with some
semblence of plot. Compound this with the 'quality level' approach
to equipment whereby nothing feels distinct or special, and the game
has forgotten to implement half of what I liked in the first place.

Its all well and good being able to play a mission for 30 mins, but
after a few goes, you recognise every single block of the auto
generated mission areas and its all just dull as you wonder around
by yourself.

Interestingly, the chat system still feels clunky. I suspect its
because I miss EQ's 'reply' ('r') key which grabs the name of the
last player you spoke to when you hit it. Using the standard '/r'
approach, you can format a message and then have a tell arrive from
someone else just before you hit enter and then have to go through
the whole palava of explaining it was a mis-tell and resending. If
you ever write a game please consider this!

The absence of player names hovering over everyones heads I don't
understand either. I've heard its for immersiveness and pvp reasons
although neither work for me. In the real world I can recognise
people, in AO everyone looks like an outcast from the rocky horror
show. I know that it was tried in beta though. The removal may be
lag related frankly - I remember reading an article somewhere about
how rendering text to then put on a 'billboard' poly was actually
really expensive.

One of the most alarming things for me, is the substitution of pvp
for 'content'. I can visualise the team sat around a table thinking
'hmm, creating high level content is going to put back the release
at least 2 months, why don't we just let the players hunt each other
instead.' Well I disagree, whilst balanced pvp is a great _addition_
it doesn't substitute for wanting to explore legendary places and
fight awesome monsters. It just doesn't motivate me as most PVP is
often too deterministic anyway, class A will always beat class B if
you both play well etc. For me balanced pvp means adding enough
complexity to remove this foregone conclussion.

Of course I haven't cancelled my account yet. If you do, then you
can't reactivate, you have to buy the game again.

Anyway, if this long rambling email was trying to make a point, its
that aspirational content is a _good_ thing if you want to keep
people playing.

Dan
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