[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants

[John Buehler]

Richard A. Bartle writes:

> On 02 March 2007, John Buehler wrote:

> >If gamers get used to markedly increased depth of experience in single
> player
> >games, they may come to expect it in multiplayer games.
> 	This certainly happened with graphics, and although I don't
> expect the
> effect to be as pronounced with virtual worlds, it could still make a
> difference.
> 	Some differences may remain, though. Few single-player
> games allow you
> to walk through NPCs, for example, but graphical virtual worlds do because
> otherwise you may find yourself unable to get somewhere because a crowd
> is blocking you (and if player characters can get in the way, too, then it
> becomes even more of a potential problem).

Character-character collision detection is certainly solveable:

http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/crowd-flows/

I very much enjoyed the animations.

> >Ultima Online had depth, while EverQuest had 3D.  EverQuest won.
> 	UO also had unrestricted PvP, money dupe bugs and a customer service
> disaster. If it hadn't, it could perhaps have held on against EQ. 3D would
> eventually have won, though. In the Far East, 1 1/2D held on for much
> longer, but they're moving to 3D worlds now.

EverQuest had its ugly points too, but players stayed.  I continue to point
the finger at the 3D graphics.  They were just so seductive, that we put up
with some outrageous uglies.  Crafting, grinding, night and storm blindness,
camping, etc.

> >Lots of the silly inconsistencies in games are probably there
> >because addressing them would interfere with the existing vision of
> >gameplay.  Some is pure sloppiness, of course.
> 	And some is repeating old mistakes.
> 	Let's say you /bow in a graphical virtual world. It generates a bow
> animation and a message. What does the message say? Well it ought to say
> "You bow."; what it actually says is, in WoW's case, "You bow down
> graciously.". Uh? I didn't want to bow down graciously: if I wanted to bow
> down graciously I would have typed "/bow down graciously". I just
> wanted to
> bow. Or maybe I wanted to /bow sarcastically, or /bow awkwardly, or /bow
> down in a rather confused manner. Why can't I do any of those things? It
> would take someone half a day to implement it. Why do I have my character
> taken away from me and made to bow in a fashion I didn't want to bow? We
> learned this lesson years ago in textual worlds; why do we get it in
> graphical worlds? Did the designers deliberately ignore the precedent, or
> were they simply unaware of it?

I doubt it was ever on their radar.  Players don't complain about the
weakness of the emote system.  It's a toy aspect of MMORPGs.  Players DO
scream bloody murder if the numbers on an item are off by a tick.

JB