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

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 19 March 2007, John Buehler wrote:
>Is that a sign of an interest in emotes for reasons of socialization or for
>reasons of seeing something fun for themselves?
	It doesn't matter. You said "I simply don't believe that the vast
majority of graphical combat game players have any interest in emote
systems.".
You didn't specify WHY they had to be interested in them.

>These are not the sort of players who are looking to get to know other
>people or are interested in presenting a sophisticated facade of a role -
>which is what subtleties such as emoting are most closely aligned with.
	Nevertheless, if those tools are available then they'll notice
them and use a few. If a virtual world appears that doesn't have them,
they'll want to know why they're not there.

>My experience has been that players
>communicate data about the game far more than spending any time at all with
>communicating anything about themselves as players or as characters.
	This may well be the case. The point is that they don't spend 100%
of their communication time on game-related data. Furthermore, tiny though
that percentage may be in terms of time spent doing it, it punches above
its weight. If people want to express something subtly, even if it's
only once a week, they'll know when they can't do it and notice when they
can.

>> 	Well, we do have actual girls playing these games.
>I didn't mean to be taken quite so literally.
	Me neither.
	What I was trying to say is that we do have people playing these games
who aren't there entirely for relentless raiding, and there's no good
reason not to cater to them.

>I think it could be quite fun as well, but the devil is in the details.  If
>the entirety of the game is about getting to level N as fast as possible,
>then smiling at vendors is going to be a macro on the keyboard and nothing
>more.
	And if the vendor is in a bad mood and you auto-smile at them, then
it'll count against you. It's pointless to give NPCs emotions if those
emotions never change in reaction to events and if your actions aren't
among those emotional events.

>A game like Second Life is far more social.  Emoting and chatting there can
>be very sophisticated, and it makes sense there.  The players are of a mind
>to use it.
	Certainly there's more of it going on in SL, but then there's not a
lot else to do there (unless the spending-time-making-things dynamic really
is a big as the media would have us believe).
	That doesn't mean players of game-like worlds wouldn't be up for it,
if it were available. After all, SL still has walking even though you can
teleport everywhere.

>The need for subtlety in a
>chat system (including emotes) is what I'm focusing on.  Unless the virtual
>world's entertainment is structured appropriately, a subtle chat system is
a
>pointless expenditure of development effort.
	I disagree. It doesn't take a great deal of effort to implement a
chat system with emotes at all - one programmer for one day, if you don't
care about having accompanying animations or sounds.
	Also, I disagree about its being pointless. Some people really like
that method of communicating and will use it a lot - if they have the
chance. WoW players don't use it because they don't have it; if they did
have it, they'd use it (and rave at how good this "new" feature is). It
would take a very sour individual to complain that Blizzard had wasted time
enhancing the communications feature when they should be re-rebalancing the
first boss in Arcatraz.

>> >Chatting and emoting in Second Life? Definitely.  In World of Warcraft?
>> >Does it get me my tier 3 gear?
>> 	It does if you do it to the right person.
>"The right person" is the key.  The "right people" aren't playing World of
>Warcraft.  They're all over in Second Life, chatting and emoting.
	No, they're playing World of Warcraft. You need a group for your tier
3 gear, that means you need to communicate with potential group members. You
may have to persuade them, if they'd rather be doing other things. If you
have more expressive power at your disposal, you can better persuade them.
Once the group is put together, hey, who cares whether you can ";falls on
his knees and begs." or not, but if you used that to get someone to group
with you, it's contributing to your getting your tier 3 gear.

		Richard