[MUD-Dev] DESIGN: Loot on demand (was: Will companysanctionedcheating hurt theMMOcommunity?)

[John Buehler]

Mike Shaver writes:
> On 5/17/05, Matt Owen <Matt.Owen at aviva.com> wrote:
>> Koster, Raph wrote on 13/05/2005 05:52:01:

>>> The MMO audiences simply seemed to prefer using the web [for
>>> bulletin boards].

>> Then bring the Web to the MMO, perhaps? (1)

> Eve Online has a microbrowser in the game which is quite useful
> for help content, player-written calculators and tools, etc.  I
> suspect it can run against a stripped-down (a la mobile phones)
> forum system, too.  > There's definitely something
> immersion-breaking about reading CNN in your game (near-future
> post-apocalyptic games possibly excluded), but I think it's less
> so than the alt-tab alternative.

I was thinking the opposite.  That if I'm going to read CNN, I
should expect to transition out of the game context in some way.
ALT+TAB might be abrupt, but CNN has no place in the game context,
so temporarily getting out makes sense to me.  The last thing I want
is to have my game environment turn from a medieval fantasy or 1800s
western town and into a place where knights or cowboys are talking
about pro football teams - because pro football team information is
easily accessible from the game itself.  It's a kind of implicit
invitation by the game to do so.

If I were at a design meeting, I'd be laboring one point: what's the
entertainment experience that we're trying to deliver to our
customers?

If players visit web sites to obtain solutions to puzzles in the
game, I'd hardly expect that to be something that we'd want
seamlessly involved in gameplay.  If players are visiting web sites
for a sense of community related to the game, then we should quite
probably be doing something to address that.  Have we limited
communication to a single server installation?  Should we expand it
to the entire player base?  Should we permit offline commentary?
Should we somehow integrate better with popular web sites such that
a game membership causes a web site registration under the same
name?

There are lots of solutions to lots of problems.  Recognizing each
problem for what it is can be a real... problem.

JB
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