[MUD-Dev] [News] NCSoft + Richard Garriott

[John Buehler]

Jessica Mulligan writes:
> At 12:13 AM 21/5/01 -0700,"Corey Crawford" <myrddin at seventh.net>
> wrote:

>>> I'm thinking maybe we should look at total amount of dollars
>>> incoming per month.

>>> Anyone have these figures for Lineage? Obviously, we can figure
>>> UO/EQ/AC's from subscription numbers.

> As of late last year and earlier this year, Lineage was bringing in
> about $5 million US per month, so NCSoft is monetizing the average
> subscriber at around $3.30 US per month each.

> Bear in mind also that the overwhelming number of Korean players are
> doing so from Internet cafes.  This adds a social element to the
> game that is hard to reproduce in the US, where the norm is a
> subscriber logging in from home.

Which harkens back to the days of paper and pencil games where the
players were sitting in the same room.  I think that it would aid in
gameplay if the games somehow mimicked this sensation.  My personal
current take on this is that having an explicit acknowledgement of the
players that I am involved with - independent of the characters that I
see on the screen - incorporated into the game interface would be
valuable.  It would probably damage the immersion element from the
virtual world standpoint, but I consider that valuable.  Let the
players get immersed in the player aspect of gameplay and less so in
the virtual world itself.

This explicit acknowledgement might take the form of a player-defined
conference call through the game software, iconic representations of
the involved players, and possibly someday showing live video of each
player (which could be turned off or fuzzed up by each player, etc).
This would be a wonderful infrastructure to have in general, of
course, not just for MUDs.  Any number of internet activities could
incorporate such a conferencing system into their internet experience.
I'm sure many here have played any number of multiplayer games while
running a conference call.  I've always found such interactions far
more entertaining than the game itself.

In the MUD realm, this could be made more practical at the bandwidth
level by transmitting text around.  But the player environment notion
needs to be manufactured regardless.  Players have to get the
sensation of playing with other players, not just their characters.
This contrasts with separate 'chat channels' for player conversations
versus character conversations.  There is no attempt at presenting a
notion of a group of players visually.

JB

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