[MUD-Dev] Star Wars Galaxies: 1 character per server

[Rayzam]

From: "Dubious Advocate" <dubiousadvocate at hotmail.com>
> "Michael Tresca" <talien at toast.net> wrote:

>> That's right. That makes you a self-contained system.  If there's
>> a party system, and presumably there is, it's purpose is for you
>> to play with other people.  If the purpose of MMORPGs was to have
>> a bunch of single-player folks running around by themselves, why
>> bother having other people on it at all?

> For a hobbyist MUD I think yours is a perfectly acceptable
> prequirement to being a member of the community.

> But it's a critical flaw for a commercial product. I'm not in
> favor of being forced into a very rigid and specific playstyle
> simply because a developer somewhere deems it desirable and
> therefore mandatory.

So you should be able to use an F-16 in Everquest, say? It's a bit
unrealistic to suggest that a developer shouldn't set
boundaries. They do.  Or that boundaries don't exist. They do. Or
that players shouldn't have any boundaries. They always do. In this
case, the developer set a boundary of different classes, so that the
monk couldn't teleport around like the wizard. So by using multiple
characters together, and having your wizard teleport your monk
around, and your healer heal him when necessary, what have you done? 
You've made a character class that has all those abilities.  If the
developers wanted someone to have all those abilities, they'd have
made a character class like that to start with. I'm assuming they
didn't want you, the player, to deal with switching between all
these characters or buying a second/third/fourth computer to run
these characters at once, and put all the abilities together. Which
is why when developers decided that teleportation was too important,
you see it appearing as an ability for everyone to use, via portals
in the game, or some other mechanism.

> The current crop of MMOGs have increasingly attempted to force
> co-dependence and social interaction.  "You SHALT play with others
> before Me!"  Their goal isn't the intangle of social evolution IRL
> - they simply want consumer retention through social factors
> supplementing addictive Pavlovian game mechanics.

There's a difference between forcing co-dependence, and bypassing
class and balance restrictions by having all the abilities in your
pocket. That's my distinction from your point here. If everybody
should have every ability, then the game could be designed that way
from the start. But games aren't and haven't been built that way.

    rayzam



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