Month: October 2006 (Page 1 of 2)

Hades has posted an article about the state of Massively Multiplayer games, where he hopes to figure out how to capture the casual gamer market. Chief on his attacks is the class system, which again gets, in my opinion, a bad rap. A snippet:

My problem with class based games is that it creates tons of downtime that simply isn’t called for. Most of the downtime, inside or outside a guild, comes from organizing your group. You can litterally sit there for hours trying to organize your groups, especially if you are relying on pick up people, just to do a task that takes 30-60 minutes. When it comes to dealing with groups in PVE or PVP, I stand by my statement from 2003.

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I really want to like Second Life. I really do. Perhaps if I were still in touch with my coding side, I’d be able to amuse myself with creating and coding inside the space. But as it is, by the time I get home, I’m just too tired to think in code. And so when I do log in, I just browse. And I tend to find the place just a bit too chaotic for my tastes.

It got a bit more chaotic this week. Designers distrust user created content because they egotistically believe that their content will be better than 99% of the content the users come up with. Programmers tend to have more pragmatic concerns, such as players creating self-replicating objects (affectionately called ‘grey goo’ by those with sufficient geek cred) that brings down the whole service.

It’s been a rough couple of months for Second Life, who had all of their credit card information hacked in September. It will be interesting to see how resilient the service in in the face of this turmoil.
Original comments thread is here