[MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Vincent Archer [mailto:archer at nevrax.com]
> According to Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com:
 
>> I just didn't meet people, you'd see someone else outside the
>> same cave as you trying to zone in, but when you both succeeded,
>> you were in different caves completing your own quests. Sure you
>> might have stood their bitching about the zoning not working too
>> well at the moment, but it was just in passing.

> That's probably the most damning feature of AO for me. The fact
> that we play in different dimensions, and there's no occasion to
> get into an area, find a few players there, and ask "what if we
> join forces?".
 
> Outside of the cities, all players are essentially playing a
> classic multi-player game, but not a massively one. Your Diablo2
> comparison is apt. AO might be a social game, but it's a game
> where I think most social ties will be formed beforehand: you'll
> arrive in with your friends, because, most of the time, you will
> not meet people.

I decided to change my approach this weekend, and completely avoid
these missions. Instead I forged out and found a few traditional EQ
style outdoor camps (there are some, although not probably not
enough to support much of the playerbase). I actually found it a
fairly unpleasant experience, the lag was a large part of the
problem, in a full group (I forget if thats 6 or 8) it was
impossible to keep track of others locations. We tried to run
between two camps, and lag meant that it took about 45 minutes and
the use of a debug location command to congregate at the second
camp.

The lack of playernames hanging over peoples heads was again very
annoying.  It simply wasn't possible to recognise who was who. When
someone called for help, you can imagine the difficulty. This was
compounded by the very narrow field of view. I play 1st person games
a fair amount and I can play Quake3 or Unreal Tournament for 8 hours
without any problem - AO had given me a headache in about 2. This
was probably caused by having to spin round again and again trying
to work out where the group was attacking. Furthermore, and this
might be my EQ conditioning speaking, 'pulling' a mob out of the
camp was such a pain it wasn't worth it. They all use ranged weapons
so to move them out of the centre required entirely too much running
- in the end we just waded into the camp and hoped for the best.

I guess my main issue is that currently its very hard to play the
game well.  The interface has some serious limitations that mean,
however much you think tactically, implementing anything is simply
too difficult.

Dan
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