The Corpnews thread that started the sadness.
Dundee’s random thoughts on the matter.
My drunken response.
Dundee’s violent agreement.
Anyuzer’s two cents.
Lum freaks out to designers asking for more god damn features.
Pictures of kittens.

The most strenuous objection in here was when Anyuzer challenges my 10 Commandments (motto: buy nine, get one free) – specifically the last one, which was: The best systems turn people into the content. My argument:

Look, at the core level, people play MMOs because other people are there. If they liked systems OR content more than other people, they’d all be playing KOTOR or Baldur’s Gate. Even the players that prefer to play MMOs alone are making a decision to play there instead of playing Morrowind. Why? Because the mere existence of other people walking by adds enough spice and interest to make up for lag and bugs that too often afflict our titles.

A snipped of Anyuzer’s spirited response (the whole thing’s too long to post):

[…I] DISAGREE VEHEMENTLY WITH. Seriously, this in my opinion is totally unproven, and it sort of bugs me as we’ve heard it for years. This is constantly why PvP was touted to be the best way of making MMOGs work. Because killing another player was always a different experience.

The problem with people being the content, and I’ll be completely honest here, is that people suck. No. Really. People are often the worst (and admittedly best) part of these games. When people become the worst part though, is when you’re forced to depend on them for ‘fun’. And naturally, there has been no perfect answer to this in any MMOG.

There are several exceptions I’d take to Anyuzer’s counterargument.

First off, when I say ‘players should be the content’, I don’t necessarily mean PvP. In fact, two of the examples I gave were non-PvP examples (City of Heroes ‘design-your-own-hotpants’ system and SWG’s ‘relax and watch the wookie do the funky chicken’). Systems that involve other players can be one of four or so varieties: I’d count competitive (pvp), cooperative (grouping in EverQuest), commercial (trading) and creative (seeing how suggestive a statue you can build just by stacking spoons). You could argue that simply socializing and/or bragging also belong in there, but I’m not going to include them since they don’t start with ‘c’.

Second off, I don’t think that PvP is inherently doomed. Let’s not forget, the number 1 and 2 MMOs in the world are both PvP-centric (although perhaps living next to Kim Il-jung would put anyone on edge). While the conventional wisdom is that PvP will never succeed in the states, the conventional wisdom also had us believing we’d all be driving flying cars by now. Someone is going to shatter that myth in a big way. They’ll probably do so by making the first American MMO where PvP feels, fundamentally, fair.

Third off, just because people suck doesn’t mean that they aren’t entertaining. Just ask Jerry Springer.