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

[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 :)

>> The whole thing feels very impersonal, and you often feel your
>> playing a single player game.
 
> Of course, they also recently announced a feature to actually let
> you toggle off other players on screen. :) Rather amazing, IMHO,
> totally contradicts the point of a massively multiplayer game, but
> I do seem to be reading many observations like yours that compare
> AO more to a single-player game.

This rumor has started spreading like wildfire recently (originating
from a slightly hasty LtM interpretation of a patch message).

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.

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.

> 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.

--
	Vincent Archer			Email:	archer at frmug.org

All men are mortal.  Socrates was mortal.  Therefore, all men are Socrates.
							(Woody Allen)
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev