[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] What is a game? (again)was:[Excellentcommentary on Vanguard's diplomacy system]

[Vincent Archer]

According to Raph Koster:
> In almost every virtual world, the play field is not the entire space;
> in fact, it's typically a very narrowly defined space that often doesn't
> include much "space" at all. Typical MMO combat, for example, pays very
> little attention to territory and topology, and there could be someone
> standing in the middle of a raid scenario playing the harmonica and it
> wouldn't make any significant difference to the combat at all other than
> minor distraction.

That might have been the case for many games in the past, but World of
Warcraft's combat pays very much attention to the topology. There are
many fights (both in the basic game, and it's first expansion) where
placement of players relative to the boss or the environment is key to
the fight.

For examples, there's fights in which the "boss" periodically uses a
devastating area-of-effect attack. You have a couple seconds to react
and hide behind walls and pillars - or die.

Other fights make the players themselves obstacles. In the Ragnaros
fight, every then and now, Ragnaros would target somebody at random
and create an explosion, expelling everybody too close to that player
all around the area (quite often in the nice and hot lava flows, where
you
would die in a second or two), leaving the targeted player unaffected.
How each player placed itself relative to all others was critical to
the success of the raid. Gruul, from the current expansion, is
another example of such a fight.

In that scheme, the "harmonica player" can very well wipe an entire
raid.

Then you have fights in which various enemies will help and heal
each other - those enemies must be drawn to a corner, out of sight
of their friends, and dealt with. Or the variant where a boss is
healed/buffed by rays coming from different corners, and players must
place themselves to intercept those rays.