First, I’m glad to see an MMO designer studying MUDs. I mean, I guess that’s a pretty obvious inspiration, but it’s still a relief these days.

“frank exploration of the game designs that influence behavior is long overdue.”

I know. Being into the convention thing you may have run into Immersyve (http://immersyve.com/about-immersyve/). I wrote a few articles on their “Player Experience of Need Satisfaction” model, including one about MUDs and MMOs (http://wetheplayers.net/?p=28).

What’s so striking to me is how little interaction there is in games online. MMOs I would think at this point should be booming with “off-topic” socializing, and yet I rarely ever see anybody talk at all, unless it’s directly related to the gameplay like in buying/selling items, pk/pvp, or looking for groups.

After spending a lot of time trying to figure that out, I really can’t help but wonder if it’s just a certain type of people who are inclined to interact outside of gameplay, and that online games attract fewer of these than they do antisocial players. Not that we should call it a day in that case, I mean there are potential solutions, but it’s just kind of the status quo that when you’re talking about something in-game outside of PMs, you’re told to shut up. Okay. Social elitism or something. Whatever, that’s nothing new.

I hate to admit it but the World of Warcraft Armory is probably the best-known example of using a web-interface that channels the gameworld: when Blizzard had enough of people’s time and attention, they invented a way to show even non-players what was going on in the game. Best-KNOWN example, but there are so many more engaging things you could do. The thing is, the challenge probably isn’t so much in coming up with clever new features but rather in persuading your player-base to use them.

Third, I support your levelless system because when designing a MUD myself, with the top goals being immersion and player cooperation, removing levels was the first thing I went with. Let the skills be the levels.

Chyeah, I can’t believe I just wrote all this. Christ, I hope you at least read it, lol.

-Roo

As for the jack-of-all-trade players, I don’t see much of a problem with it as long as your system doesn’t have them maxing every skill out. Our system has a linear gradient to the skill levels that naturally time-limits the amount of gain that a player has with a particular character or even skill during the life of that character. You can always change your character’s course in the game, but you probably won’t be maxing everything out unless you play the same character for years.

I think the reaction you had was akin to the reaction some people have to movies with bad endings. They walk out and say the same kinds of things, nothing wrong with that. My point was that since our medium is a lot more interactive, and since we’re a little more aware of this type of thing since you’ve pointed it out, we should fold that knowledge into our game design to improve the overall experience by taking advantage of the ability to have it both ways(I think I had a hard time getting that across in the blog- I blame the caffeine).

As for the adaptation of people to the change of MMO’s becoming “mortal”, it’s a good question. I don’t see average players sticking it out to the end of the game, unless they’re just curious as to how things wind up. Core players would stay- much like the violin quartet on the Titanic- not jumping ship until the very end, possibly because they’re unsure of where to go, or maybe because they’re looking to move to a new game as a whole guild.

They need more sociologists and psychologists studying games

I was mostly noticing the difference and how attitudes have changed over time. As I said, the conventional wisdom formerly was that these games were immortal as much as we want them to be. I think the reality is now shown to be very different, and I’m wondering how much people have really adapted to this change.

I didn’t really expect a 1-year-old TR to have the same feelings toward it as a 6-year-old M59 did when it was first shut down. But, I thought the changes in attitude were important to note since nobody else has really pointed this out before.

I took a different approach to yourself, using free text entry as the method of asking questions. The idea was to link it to a standard dialogue tree so that the player could jump off that at any point and dig for further information and clues using a more natural language parser.