MMO Communities (was RE: [MUD-Dev]MMORPG Cancellations:Theskyisfalling?)

[Byron Ellacott]

Matt Mihaly wrote:

>> Until the creation of such quests is a sufficiently small amount
>> of work that it's OK to have only one person able to consume that
>> work, it's impractical to have the solving of a quest affect the
>> game world.  If you have around two thousand players per shard,
>> that means you'd need to put in two thousand times as much effort
>> to get the same number of quests for each player as you would
>> when quests can be repeated by others.

> Well, remember that MMOs that are sharded are in the distinct
> minority, as are MMOs with 2000 players online, period.

I'd agree with that if you had spoken about online games, or
multiplayer online games, or multiuser dungeons, even, but not when
you speak about massively multiplayer online games. :)

I do see your point, though.  To counter it, a game that has 2000
players total, instead of 20,000 players total, probably has a
similarly scaled down budget as well, and the problem remains.  If
you want quests to have consequences, that means they can only be
done once (or have a reasonably long elapsed time between being
repeatable), which means that if you have n players in your world,
to give them the same number of quests you will have to do n times
as much work.  Players online simultaneously isn't as important a
measurement - Bubba's rats are still dead, regardless whether I was
online at the time they were killed or not.

--
bje
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