As has been said countless times, World of Warcraft proved us (myself included) wrong. Way wrong.

There's a lot of reasons for this. But chief among them, in my opinion, was because at its heart, it's a game. For gamers.

Gaming is what has been on the rise since the 70s. It's people who want a good time, fun alone or with friends.

Meanwhile, The MMOG genre was growing at a steady clip based mostly on people who wanted a cool online experience, live a virtual life. The advertising of the day speaks volumes for the audience companies were attracting. People were compelled to roleplay in these emerging graphical environments. They could build houses, host vendors, found settlements, all the stuff someone seeking a virtual existence would love.

The steady growth of the genre had this playstyle at its root. Everquest was one of the early departures from this, but even it was the sort of environment in which societies could be born. As has recently come up again here, EQ had the sort of downtime that people simply wanted to fill with conversation. But this was still mostly between people who came here to have a virtual life.

WoW did not go after this audience. That it happened to capture a great deal of them is expected, since the core experience bears more similarities to EQ and other diku-inspired games than not. However, WoW also did what few other MMOs did before it: capture lots of gamers.

Gamers want different things than virtual lifestylers. One need go no further than compare Second Life to Guild Wars to see that difference. One also doesn't need tea leaves to see which crowd is more numerous, and therefore understand why business is leaning towards delivering more online game than online roleplaying game.

Veterans lament the demise of roleplaying. But that happened concurrent to the sheer explosive growth of the genre. That growth has come from attracting gamers, who come with their own expectations, borne of experience in games of other genres. And even the veterans have benefitted, because to deliver against a gamer's expectation, certain elements must be in place:

• Can I get into it right away? None of this nonsense about having to look all over the world for my first quest NPC. No being able to kill oneself by hitting the wrong key with that NPC. No crazy-kludged interface showing me stuff I won't need to worry about for 20 or more hours of game time.
• Does it work? The days of unplayable instability are over. It works or it doesn't and the latter gets roundly villified. And then ignored.
• Am I having fun right away? 20 levels before I can start having fun? 10 levels before my first real ability? No thanks. That may work in some games, but the most obvious examples are either in decline or built for a different culture entirely.
• Am I winning? Gone are the days where twinking has been the only way to achieve good equipment in the first 15 hours of play. The game giveth or the players walketh.
• Are others in my way? Liking other people is very different from wanting them between you and the objective set for you by the game. Unless they are specifically in your way because of objectives set by the game for them (as in, a WoW Battleground), other players in public-space adventure areas can be a huge source of annoyance. Some games try to solve this through crazy contrived systems. Others just put the best content into instantiated zones created just for you or your group.

Notice has been served to the genre by the newcomers who brought games, and gamers, to the fold. That is where the growth was always sitting. Looking back, it's obvious. Lots of money in video games, lots of people buying and playing. Lots of money in MMOGs, but not nearly as many people. I think we finally understand why that was.

And it's about damned time.

Trouble is, it doesn't sound new at all.

From the press release:

WEBZEN Inc. (NASDAQ:WZEN), a leading global online entertainment company, today announced that the company will present a new payment model to its gamers in Korea for its upcoming online video game, "Soul of the Ultimate Nation." The highly anticipated game, which is currently in the open beta phase in Korea, will offer players free basic service in the market with optional in-game items and services offered for nominal fees, also known as micropayments.

How is this "new"? Is it new to Webzen? I would expect most new MMORPGs launching in Korea to be based on micropayments. To me, the question is how long it'll take before they start becoming the standard in the West.

Not that I think the few that are here now are representative of huge hits in North America. Space Cowboy, Archlord, Maplestory and apparently Everquest 2's trade-enabled servers all seem to have not yet gained serious traction in the U.S., or are reporting numbers in ways the usual gentries of aggragated ranting don't pick up upon. Can't blame the punditry of course. Most have been disliking microtransactions/RMTs since the days buying and trading Ultima Online gold was the big thing to hate.

Played this at E3 a bit. Except that you could set some fairly interesting parameters for the instances you enter, it seemed likely a prettier version of Guild Wars. I don't know what their business plan is for North America and Europe. But between the above announcement and their earlier one about partnering with Massive Entertainment to provide ingame advertising, another no-no for the veteran set, I wonder who their target player is going to be in the West.

If you see a mob with a spear, leather jerkin and sandals, why are you not able to loot that spear, leather jerkin and sandals when you kill it?

And, if you could, in what game could you best do this?

Raph expounds on the highs and lows of WYSIWYG loot. I'm not sure I totally agree though that this can only effectively work in a wordly game, as he seems to imply.

I think bio-linked loot (a term Yivvits coined in the comments thread there) can work in Dikus, if they have a reason to break common loot down into sub-component crafting resources.

I'm thinking of AC2, later SWG, the Disenchanting skill in WoW and the new Jewelcrafting "Prospecting" skill coming to it. All allow items to be broken down into consumable resources others can use in crafting processes.

Granted, I consider neither AC2 nor SWG particularly diku in the EQ/WoW sense of the word. However, WoW Disenchanting is a very useful skill already, as the crafting skill (Enchanting) that uses the result (shards) have as their business the ability to add stats to both crafted and world-dropped items. The profession is so lucrative, most Enchanters do not even bother getting their stuff to disenchant by adventuring. They get it by buying the "junk" people sell on the Auction House.

A strong "crafting" economy is possible in a diku too. But one must assume:

• Most players are NOT there to pick flowers
• A thriving crafting economy can be based on just the few that are, and those that support them.

I often wonder if folks pushing crafter-centric games understand just how small a percentage of gamers actually want to craft. To me, it's great to build a real deep crafting engine. But in this age of obvious easy-to-see paths to revenue and headcount, crafting is a subset of a hunting game, where the percentage of time spent developing crafting should match to the percentage of players expected to bother.

The alternative is to expect fewer players and scale your business to match. There's enough room for both WoW and ATITD. It's just that when convincing folks to invest in your game, they're going to want to know why you're not chasing the big cash. If you ask anyone, they'll say they want a deeply engaging crafting system. If you see the resultant attempts to do so in diku-inspired games, you'll see the complaints that come with it, like "what, I have to actually pay attention while crafting?!" (from EQ2).

Usually in a diku you have a few dedicated crafters, more than that number dedicated to collecting resources and selling in bulk to them, and the rest consuming the end result as part of their equipment set while off killing mobs for the rest of it. 10 people can bang out enough swords to arm a server of thousands in a diku. And that's how it should be because those thousands are the primary reason that diku was inspired.

So in this system, getting a spear from a mob who was holding the spear can mean you either get the uncommon/rare/uber spear, or something you yourself could either break down to a component for crafting, or which can be sold to someone who has that skill.

Easy to say, incredibly tough to get right. I won't say WoW does it perfectly. But again, for the number of people interested in crafting, I think they do a pretty good job.

But I will close with this: the group that can achieve the vision for how UO was supposed to work initially are going to win in my opinion. Combat was deep there for reasons different from "because I killed Boss #12 the 37th time". And they were better. But to try this again is to risk quite a bit when it's so far been proven that strict linearity sells.

While I hated this rule at the time, as a parent now I can see the value of it, or at least some variant.

And, according to Ars Technica, so does the magazine Pediatrics.

The short form:

According to Dr. Iman Sharif, the results were clear-cut. "On weekdays, the more they watched, the worse they did," said Dr. Sharif. Weekends were another matter, with gaming and TV watching habits showing little or no effect on academic performance, as long as the kids spent no more than four hours per day in front of the console or TV. "They could watch a lot on weekends, and it didn't seem to correlate with doing worse in school," noted Dr. Sharif.

I can agree. Though my oldest is only four, my wife and I already see a huge difference in her behavior between when she watches TV or plays games on the computer and when she's not. In my admittedly untrained opinion, I feel this has to do with the amount of cognitive inputs she's receiving at any time. When the TV and computer are off, there's only so much her brain has to process. So no matter how engaging a meal or her latest drawing project might be, when Mommy or Daddy talk, she's almost got no choice but to listen.

She's a very focused kid, when she wants to be. Not having the TV or computer on makes it easier to be. 

This is an age of multi-tasking, with everyone yammering about how today's tweens are better than today's adults at it. But all I see is the continual problems. I'm no academic, but just from interacting with lots of people every single day, it seems to me that the brain can only process so much actively at a time. When focus shifts, so does attention. Are today's tweens simply better at shifting focus faster, making it appear as if they're multi-tasking? I don't know.

But what I do see is a lot of failures coming from attempts multi-tasking. People seem to think that because they can walk and chew gum at the same time, they can drive, be on a telecon, and checking their PDA concurently. Anyone who works with Crackberry users see this all the time in meetings, though it could also be any PDA or any connected laptop. Anyone who watches kids listen to music while IMing while emailing while gaming while studying can easily see that somethings not getting active attention. And it's usually the studying.

In my opinion, people need to be made more aware of their limitations. Society and commerce can expect whatever they want, and as an adaptive species, we'll always rise to the challenge in some way. However, I think people individually need to be held more accountable for what they try and attempt when they multi-task. And parents need to be more aware about the limitations of their kids, making honest assessments based on results rather than hype or hope.

Maybe it's just that people need to make that ONE BIG HUGE MISTAKE to learn. Seems to be the hallmark of humanity.

Fortunately, The Economist is with-it as well.

Some interesting data-points are mentioned within.

• There are 747,263 residents as of late September
• This is growing by about 20% every month
• There are about 7,000 profitable businesses in the game, with the top 10 entrepreneurs making about $200,000 in profit every year.
• About 25,000 lease property of some amount (at $20 per acre), which generates about $1mil a month for Linden Labs
• A possible Democratic candidate for President in 2008 gave an interview in the virtual world (with 62 people attending, heh)
• Roughly 9,000 people are logged in at any given time.

Wait a sec… 9,000? Out  of almost 750k?!

I'm not sure what's more telling: that a game with so many residents barely collects just $1mil a month, that only 3% of them are paying any money into the game at all or that so relatively few of them are online at any given time.

It makes me wonder: has the concurrency roughly been around that number for all of this time with only the number of residents going up? Do they include in that 747k all residents, including those who pay nothing but still have an active account? 

To me, SL has always been the game most people talk about but don't actually play. Web 2.0, a new form of browsing, the next Matrix, whatever, it's still a fairly niche experience with a very steep learning curve. As "big" as the game has gotten, it still is incredibly hard to pick up for a neophyte, not to mention all of those people who haven't ever been around content creation tools. I'm sure Mark Warner (that Democratic candidate/hopeful) had a whole staff of folks not only customizing his avatar, but programming how it'd move).

<>That this makes for a great market/commerce opportunity for real SL residents has long been proven. But I'm forced to wonder if their market is a bunch of temporary hey-this-is-cool seekers who dive in, make some choices, buy some stuff from other players, realize the Herculean task ahead of them to actually learn this stuff, and head off for games that deliver to them content on a silver platter. 

When I quit last November, it wasn't out of disgust or anything like that. I just reached what I thought was the threshold of what I could invest into WoW. As such, there were a few things I relegated to the realm of the impossible-for-me.

Ragnaros

About a month prior to quiting, I didn't think I'd ever even hit Molten Core, much less the last mob in it. Now, almost a year later, and the rest the guild and alliance having practiced and geared up while I was away, most of MC is a veritable cake-walk. When I left we were just up to Garr (the fourth mob in, depending on how one clears them), and that was a multi-hour achievement by itself.

Lesson #1: The more dedicated a group becomes, the less time it takes to do something, the more inclusive the event can be for the time-strapped.

Battlegrounds

I had only had some light PvP fun previously. This go-around I dediced to take a chance. I figured if I was going to get wtfpWned in the Battleground, better to do so with guildies. As it happens, not only was I competitive, in my dated gear nad rusty knowledge, I find the opposing "AI" so compelling I PvP almost 75% of the time now.

Lesson #2: PvP is not just for the 8-hour-a-day crowd who've already got Naxx on farm status.

The Great Masquerade

Back in my days as a wee Mage, I followed a friend to Stormwind Keep for some First Aid training. As we enter the Keep, we see a of players following some guy named Reginald Windsor to the center potium. Some speech ensues and suddenly all heck breaks loose. Dragonkin, players, everyone's going at it, and all labeled ??. I decided to join the fray, but at level 26, I couldn't hit anything. It was one of the coolest sights I had ever seen in an MMOG, which is saying something (to me). I figured it was like awakening the Sleeper in Everquest though: something I'd only ever read about or watch from afar.

Imagine my surprise then when yesterday I actually summoned Windsor myself at the Stormwind gate and marched with him to expose "Lady Prestor" for what she really is. That I was accompanied by one of my oldest friends online (though not in this screenshot) was particularly poignant.

<>Lesson #3: Nothing is impossible with friends.

Reputation Rewards

Factions are another grind. I never thought I'd have the patience and time to bother. But the more I focus on the Battleground Factions (League of Arathor from Arathi Basin and Stormpike Guard from Alterac Valley) and that of Argent Dawn, the more realistic the rewards from Revered and Exalted become. Finding out the best ways to increase Reputation is a game unto itself.

New Predictions

In keeping with my tradition of not knowing myself, not knowing what I'm capable of and continually underestimating the value of friendship, here's some new predictions, just in time for Burning Crusade:

• I'll never like another class as much as the Mage. By and large, this has held very true. The only class that comes close has been Warlock, but I'm already fairly well geared up on my Mage. To repeat all of that and get to the same level would simply take too long, particularly with the pending level cap increase. I'd do it if I didn't love the Mage as much as I do.
• I'll never be anything but a Fire-specced Mage. Generally "Fire-Spec" means some Arcane talents too, but it's the Fire that does the damage. This, too, has held true so far. I love blowing stuff up. It's during those unfortunate encounters like Ragnaros though where I get tempted to go Frost. And in BGs, where I realized just how little survivability I have. But that's why I took up Engineering.
• I'll never hit Naxxramas. This is believable mostly because by the time I've got the gear to survive the encounter, and by the time my guild is interested in bothering to hit this, Burning Crusade will be out and we'll be up for questing to level 70. Even if I go back and play the Warlock, once BC comes out I can't see MC>BWL>Ony>Naxx being anything but a sidebar activity, unless they revamp it totally. Would anyone bother gearing up for a Naxx fight when by level 65 or so the encounter will be negligible?
• I'll never finish Zul'Gurrub nor AQ40. Both believable too, for the same reason as Naxx.

So there you have it. Will I be proving myself wrong yet again? Will Blizzard want to maximize the investment they made in creating this content by revamping it for a level 70 gain? Will I still be playing when they do?

Only time will tell.

So I decided to tip-toe a bit into PvP, specifically Battlegrounds. Oddly enough, being over a year late, I haven't been completely outclassed. And I'm playing what amounts to the least survivable template of a near-one-dimensional class.

Background 

My first foray into Alterac Valley (AV) was akin to my first entry into Molten Core, partly because neither place was a destination I thought I'd ever arrive at. But the similarity ends there. Unlike MC, where eventually you know exactly how the place is going to respond to your actions, no two Battleground fights are ever the same. Sure the NPCs within all respond predictably. But in classic RTS style, you just don't know how the opponent players will.

I've come to Battlegrounds late. Apparently there's a whole bunch of things that have changed about them over time. Most recently Blizzard instituted cross server battlegrounds, where in your particular battle, your team and that of the enemy could be from any number of servers. Cumulatively, the changes of the last year all seem to have improved BGs in the minds of players. Not having lived it though, I've only read accounts.

I like AV. It's probably about the size of a medium outdoor zone like Elwynn Forest or Dun Murogh. And there's lots of side-objectives to try out as well as a few different tech trees. For example, you can make your own NPC Guards more powerful, unlock a fighting force of powerful mounted NPCs, unlock this crazy-huge walking tree thing and so on. The main goal is to defeat the leader of the opposing side, himself a raid-level boss. They're surrounded by guards who, interestly enough, are linked to the number of towers held by the side. For example, if the Alliance destroys the Tower Point tower, the "Tower Point Warmaster" guard despawns.

But it's just not that easy. You never know where the enemy is going to decide to defend. You never know if they're going to take all 40 of their members and assault your base in a zerg, split them between objectives, or whether they have any real coordination at all. AV is all pickup-group, and while there are ways to cheat the system, there's really no way to guarantee 40 people you know well and talk to on voicechat will be in the same AV instance.

And that's the real challenge.

Ability to Learn

• In Raiding, you and your force can get better if you always have the same people together, learning together, being lead together, gearing up together.
• In AV, you can't get that. So typical pickup-group (PUG) dynamics take over.

Typical pickup-group dynamics include no clear leader, constant bickering, no clear objectives people agree on, a complete disillusionment with early failure and wins based sometimes on luck and sometimes on emergent leadership.

Nowhere is that more apparent in the smaller Battleground, Arathi Basin (AB). AB is a capture-the-flag type game. The number of flags you hold each round contributes to number of resources your side collects. It's a simple counter that increases every minute. The first side to reach 2,000 resources is the winner.

Unlike AV, in AB you can arrive as a raid force (15 people max). But most don't, instead arriving with a PUG. And the difference is apparent. I have yet to be in a PUG against a guild where the PUG wins. The entire methodology of the opposing force is different. And they don't even need voicechat to win. They just have to wait for the PUG to descend into uncontrolled chaos as it most often will.

But sometimes it doesn't.

Emergent Leadership 

Sometimes a leader will emerge, early on, and issue orders others follow. There's a few dynamics in play here:

• How the leader emerges: If a braggart swaggers into the /battleground chat channel, they'll get shouted down by other braggerts. However, a truly authoritative figure, someone who carries the Teddy Rooselevent "Big Stick" while walking tall comes in and starts issuing orders, there's a good chance people will listen. This is because:
• The nature of the orders: Do they make sense? Are they properly explained? There's not a lot of things to do in AB. There's only five flags after all, and while all are open for capture, there are better ones to get. This is because of the layout of the zone. It's easier to capture one flag and be able to support two others than it is to capture other flags and defend those.
• The nature of the participants: Are they experienced AB attendees? I find that the newbies and the most experienced are the most apt to listen to good orders. It's those who think they're smarter than they are, or those who just never want to be told what to do, who don't.
• Consistent leadership: A leader who issues orders that make sense only gets the group started. A true leader is constantly watching the map, ordering forces to defend or give up or take. As long as they're not jerks about it, they'll get listened to, because:
• The price of success: If the orders are delivered well and consistently and the results are palpable, people will listen. They need those demonstrable results though. Here I feel an analogy to raid drops. As long as they flow consistently enough, people are motivated to get them. This, and demonstrable success of leadership are Dark Arts though in my mind.

I also see a corrolation between Raid/Guild leaders and Battleground temporary Leaders. Some say leaders are born, not made. Maybe that's so, but I feel there's a bit of leadership in everyone, just waiting for the opportunity to come out. Temporary groups in a game that'll last no more than 20 minutes are great environments in which to try leadership on for size. Even if you entirely flub it, most of those people won't remember you anyway. That's the beauty of cross server battlegrounds.

But even effective leadership can only work with the force they've got at the time. PUG battlegroups are, by nature, at a constant disadvantage as a result. They're always playing together for the first time. I imagine this is just like pickup raid groups. I've never participated in a pickup raid in WoW or anywhere, and based on these battleground experiences, I am even less-inclined to bother.

All of this is well-known of course, the very reason why Guilds are created and sought after. Any consistency makes for a more efficient gaming experience. The best leaders are those that emerge for an occasion and prove to those being lead that following orders is going to get everyone their desired results.

But like I said, it's a Dark Art.

Throughout the year, my eye has been on the Nintendo Wii. This is likely the first console I'll actually buy since the Nintendo 32bit machine from the mid-1990s.

Today this decision was nailed home for me.

In a Gamasutra article, they reference this New York Times article (requires login) which details some new information about the Wii:

• North/South American Released: 11/19.
• 25 Games for launch
• Standard AAA titles will go for $50, which bucks industry trend of $60+
• Includes the digital delivery of classic games they expect to list for between $5 and $10.
• Integrated photo support for TV display as well as News and Weather "channels".

Add to the above their already way-innovative controller, and expand the "classic games" to include every Nintendo title ever made, and we have a system that could conceivable appeal to every Nintendo fan there ever has been and talks specifically to people who don't want to learn to play even higher-resolution games on the same old controller.

While Sony and Microsoft duked it out for dominance of the high-end graphics space in the last generation, Nintendo quietly talked to an audience neither of the other two even bothered to address. And then, earlier this year when the Wii Controller was revealed, both competitors fell over themselves trying to capture Nintendo fans by saying things like "oh, yea, the Wii will be a great second system to our PS3/Xbox!"

<><>

Meanwhile, Nintendo is effectively saying that competition between Sony and MS is irrelevant to them. The very essence of Blue Ocean thinking.

Now, this isn't to say the competitors aren't thinking innovation either. Between the Xbox Live Arcade/Marketplace and Live Anywhere ideal, and Sony's own Virtual Console, this new generation is less about raw graphics and speed and more about what-else-can-it-do.

And that's an important development in my mind, beyond the innovations of expanding the playerbase. Many of us have watched the rise of platform independent media consumption, watching movies on cellphones, making phonecalls through Second Life, that sorta thing. But to date, the Living Room/Den of a house has been a sanctuary away from this always-on connectivity.

This new generation of consoles stands to change that. Photos on the TV, streamed movies from the computer, banking on a console, it's all converging. Now whether people want this, or continue to relegate their consoles to the media room remains to be seen.

Personally, I expect the adopters and deniers to be separated by generation. And for both groups to find commonality with the Wii.

Overall, I felt they cast a blind eye to a number of emerging trends, but the stuff they covered about the "core" marketplace (basically as defined by diku-inspired games) was pretty good. And insightful.

The presentation was about 45 minutes of talking and 15 minutes of Q&A. The talking portion was supported by a Powerpoint show, which Jon has hosted on his Team page at Sigil Games. You can read that presentation at whim. It says stuff that's fairly straight forward. But when they were describing individual points on the slide, I found I disagreed with them about half the time (mentally, of course. I wasn't raising my hand to argue with them or anything…)

Industry Standard UI

Early on, the talk was about capturing users and giving them a fun and easy to learn experience. Common sense rule there, but they went on to say that perhaps WoW's UI should become an industry standard UI by which all MMORPGs follow.

I can appreciate why they say that. After all, this is two companies arguably working on games that will follow the same methodology that WoW followed. Hotkeys, macros, chat box, yadda yadda.

But my problem with this statement is that this assumes the entire genre going forward is going to focus on derivative EQ-style experiences. By itself that is the death of innovation, because this assumes the same game mechanic throughout at a time when the very breadth of this genre is replete with examples to the contrary. But I'll go more into that below when this comes up again.

PC is on the way out

And Consoles are on the rise. Makes sense, again, except it flies in the face with emerging platform independence trends. Designing an MMO for a console is very different from a PC. Keyboards are not the norm. Internet connectivity may be there but the publisher of that Console may have an oppressive business requirement preventing things like easy subscriptions or item sale-based revenue flows. Bringing diku to consoles is easy. Making it as relevant and affordable is something else.

Further, with computers lasting longer and being passed throughout the household as new ones are bought, we can expect PCs to be around, and relevant for gaming, for quite a few more years at least.

You need to choose a platform to start with, but even AAA single-player title developers can't afford to not consider multiple platforms. MMORPGs can afford that even less.

Oh, and they see that Brick & Mortar retailers will be critical partners for the short term (next few years at least). I tend to agree. We all talk digital distribution, but it's still young, and frought with different types of challenges that traditional retailers don't have. The big benefit also is that traditional retail comes with embedded secondary advertising. They want people walking around their store, so feature items that grab attention and make impulse purchases. The web does not easily facilitate impulse purchasing for the average consumer, outside of closed systems like iTunes.

Import Single Player Developers

Here is where I completely agreed with them. The point they made was that the industry has long been mired in conventions invented during the MUD days. The focus on resource gathering (whether plants or gear) has overshadowed the need to have fun doing it. So they recommend adding single player game developers to the core design and development team so that their insights into having a momentarily fun experience can be integrated with the thought process.

This is important, and we're seeing it already, with games like Tabula Rasa and Age of Conan escewing normal diku conventional UIs in favor of something more engaging to play. In realtime. They are both largely still about resource gathering, but wrapped in a narrative shell and with a different UI to prevent the "more of the sameness".

Trade-offs

They have been around awhile so have seen and discussed the same stuff we all see and discuss. One slide in particular talked about setting realistic goals by understanding what is truly important for launch and making trade-offs as a result:

• Breadth vs Depth
• Quality vs Scope
• Polish vs Additions

Each game will want something different, but their opinion is tha you focus on Quality, Polish and a deep experience over a broad one. It's hard to argue with this point, particularly in light of history. Notable quote from the slides:

Build a simple by deep game

Build enough content at launch that people cannot see the horizon

Get to playing the game as soon as possible, even if that means using middleware

And: get your entire company, full of cross-functional specialists, to play it. Gauge their reactions. If they're not logging in on their off time, if they're dreading the weekly build play session, if they make excuses, then there's something wrong with the fun factor of it. This is really important. People complain about not playing their own games enough, so really need to understand why. If it's not fun, it's not fun. Fix it before the public sees it because otherwise they're just going to point out the same thing publicly and loudly. Notable quote:

How do you know when it's fun? When you get your designers and artists playing it instead of wanting to go home

Do this by building "vertical slices" of the game, experiences that can be had, to test out the game play. Game systems can be built in parallel, but concepts, notably for UI and motivations, need to be tested, even if built separately from the core system. Build this vertical slice many times for every system. Test throughout development.

And of course, give yourself more time to build and test. Because that's easy…

Item Sales and Innovation

They, like many, see this as a Panacea for future revenue flows. That's fine of course, but this is where I wanted to talk about innovation again.

Item sales ingame, as defined by veteran developers, almost require a diku-inspired experience. The above assumes the future is all diku really, which is myopic in my opinion. And wierd, coming from companies that fear comparisons to WoW more than anything (because their games are/will-be similar in mechanic).

The point is to differentiate. If you sell weapons, and they sell weapons, and your game which isn't out yet is similar to theirs which launched two years ago, therefore targeting the same player, they win. Why try and make the same game then? To tweak what's been tweaked indefinitely?

That'll work for some, but others think differently. From the games mentioned above to Stargate Worlds to Star Trek Online, to web-based MMOs to mobile-based MMOs, there are a lot more people not copying EQ than those that actively are. In my opinion, WoW capped that course of action.

MMOGCharts Myopia

The blind spot I think they have though, predictable given their history, is with the emergence of web-based MMOs. By some estimates, it's not WoW that's the biggest MMO in the world, but rather Mapplestory (UK-based, coming to US). But its business is different, it's barrier to entry almost as low as possible, and the qualities of the game play just that different.

I call this "MMOGCharts Myopia" because it seems as though people only talk about the games that hit that chart. Good for SirBruce and his consulting gig, but bad for companies that want to think beyond the 9,000lb gorilla that is WoW. The basis of comparison on those charts is, to me, largely mitigated in relevance by just how many games do not use traditional subscription accounts/we-hate-RMT approach to reporting and gauging their own success. Given emerging trends, I see less games coming with that traditionalist approach too.

Conclusion

Overall a great presentation. I disagreed with about half of what they said, but it was all very intelligent and spoken through real experience so valuable all the same.

An extract of the email:

We are pleased to announce the pre-launch website of PrisonServer: The
Online Prison. An online, persistent and multiplayer RPG game made in
Spainthat is about to open its localized English PrisonServers. The game
is already running since 2003 in Spanish language, receiving updates and
patches since then, while building a groovy Spanish community.

The URL is http://www.prisonserver.co.uk (where you can find a little
bitmore about the game).

Our main entrance is http://www.prisonserver.com (from there you select
your language, and you can see our full, Spanish site in action). Please
note that the Spanish and English server are completely set apart
systems,game accounts, etc. We'll allow English only on prisonserver.co.uk.

The game has the least descriptive and inspiring description I've ever read. It's making me wonder how much has been lost in translation:

PrisonServer is a PC online game for Windows. It's a persistent world, multiplayer online game. The game is played exclusively over the Internet with other real players from all over the world. Combines classic online RPG gameplay and unique feaures. You have to survive and make your way from just a rookie to gang leader or boss, meet new friends and get a life while becoming stronger to gain real respect. Players unite, collaborate & fight creating their own gangs and ranks within the prison confinements

Clicking a few links, here's what it seems to be:

• Theme: Modern-day Prison. Start as a newbie, become a gang leader, make friends, the usual vague promise of becoming a leader among people.
• Graphics: Pretty dated. Lots of corridors, which makes sense given the theme but makes it no more impressive than a console shooter from that era. This isn't helped by the screenshot library, which shows a bunch of people standing around.
• Movement: 3D Click to move, like Shadowbane or the defunct Wish.
• Combat: Seems to be like every diku-inspired game: click action buttons, roll automated dice, watch calculated actions.
• Character Customization: XP, levels, gear. You've been there.
• Standard PvP rules: Optional on Normal servers but open (with safe areas) on PvP servers.

The game has been around since 2003. According to the main page, they have 8,283 "Prisoners". Since just underneath that number they say "50 Last Accounts created from", followed by a list of countries, I'm guessing "Prisoners" means Accounts. So, just over 8k accounts. Doesn't seem like a smash.

Is it worth checking out? Probably if you're the type who wants to say they've played every game with "MMO" somewhere in its description. I personally found the theme interesting, and plan to check out the game itself, even after having watched a not-so-impressive video. But I'm not expecting much. Not sure from where I'll download the 300mb client, but it's currently available at:

• The main site
• Gamershell
• GameZone

The account creation page asks very few questions. They don't even seem to ask for a Credit Card #, so don't seem concerned about the under-18 year old crowd. Their current free-to-play promo lasts for one month though so who knows what'll change in October.