Every other new MMO will lose because they want a million subscribers. WoW has won the social network of MMOs. That is where its success comes from. Any new MMO should be content with no more than 150k subscribers. If they cannot sustain themselves on that, then the MMO will fail.

Another aspect that a lot of new (failing) MMOs seem not to get.

Content.

WoW works because it has a MASSIVE amount of content. Yes, much of that content is actually repetitive and not all that compelling. But there is tons of it and it's crafted so each bit is just different enough in flavor that a player can self-justify it as different, even though it's really yet another "kill X/gather Y/escort Z" variation.

A number of MMOs I've seen come out and fail pretty quickly because they apparently get into their heads that having a hot innovative game engine is enough, that they can get away with a minimal amount of content if the game looks pretty or has some unique gameplay mechanic. You see after launch players burning through the sparse content in a matter of days, and their forums filling with complaints that "there's nothing to doooo!". Most telling is the second month after launch, when all the folks who elected not to renew their accounts leave.

People don't necessarily WANT super quality. They'll quite happily settle for mediocre, as long as it's in quantity.



-k

While I agree with the whole content thing, I could argue that EQII and LotRO have just as much if not more content than WoW (LotRO has a lot of crap you can do). But yeah, you're right.. an MMO gets pretty boring if there's nothing to do.

What I was suggesting for a Shadowrun MMO is more diverse forms of content. Mission for Mission, the SR MMO may not have the same amount of ''kill X/gather Y/escort Z'' missions, but in return it could have entirely other options. Some people really don't get bored of grinding all day, they really don't. Other people, such as myself.. really do get bored of grinding all day, doing the same thing over and over again. Granted I do it if there was nothing else to do, but if you have a little bit of diversity you can solve the problems for both types of people.

If you want to grind, you don't necessarily have to grind your standard SR missions. You could instead opt to ''grind'' Urban Brawl.. using your money and skills to buy a better bike and piloting skills. You can ''grind'' tradeskills, making foci or programs either legally or illegally. Alternatively, some hacker who gets a little tired of doing the standard datasteal or something similar, can ''take a break'' and start forging programs from his virtual foundry.. getting a little extra dough and maybe making a new program he really needed for a lot cheaper than attempting to buy it legally (or legally)

Integrating player relations and creativity could help to. Not only can there be player-made Urban Brawl teams.. let's say you can actually bet on a team? In addition to the thrill of gambling, some PCs may create their own run to outsource to other PCs in an attempt to sabotage the other team. Hell, the betters themselves could create such a mission. If an idea like that could be implemented, you could tons and tons of content that wouldn't always necessarily be the same thing, over and over again. Player-created missions would be missions matching a certain situation, and you play to that situation.. instead of visiting that 'X' corp Johnson who always schedules runs for you against 'Y' corp.

That would be something quite innovative, a system that allows the game to support user-created quests. Creating bounties, gather items, sabotages, escorts...that would be really cool. The only difficulty would be that the player creating the quest would have to get some sort of incentive to spend time doing that. But, having a "fixer" type character in the game would go a long way to give both another dimension of gameplay as well as increase the amount of content in a game.

you need to allow 'guilds' to spend extra money on 'corporate accounts': They can own a Corp, or a Criminal Organization, or A Government Bureaucracy

A guild can instead of choosing to be a bunch of runners, can get together and run a corp. They start out at A level, and all of their members are employees.

Scientists, Researchers, Johnsons, Corp Security, etc...

So you have small groups, and individual players who go around being shadowrunners, and then you have big guilds who go around being:
Corps, Criminal Organizations, Government Spooks, etc.

One creates content for the other, and vice versa.

I thought of the possibility of allowing player characters to be Fixers themselves in such a way as a profession or something.. maybe something secondary to their primary skillset? Or if they want they could go full-Fixer. It'd be an easy way to make money.. setting up other Shadowrunners for runs, getting paid for that... selling/buying gear for runners, getting paid for that, etc. The only problem I can see would be a reliable method of karma generation for a Fixer.. what could they do that would give them more karma?

There could be a lot of advantages to a PC Fixer.. such as a PC with high Charisma and Negotiation skills getting that piece of 'Ware a runner wants far cheaper than an NPC Fixer could, or a PC Fixer with mob or corp connections that can call in a ''favor'' or two every now and then. It would definitely be for the business-minded players of the game..
I'd like to see some sort of favor system implemented anyway... maybe 'x' number of runs beneficial to a criminal syndicate or corp earns you ''favor points'' that you can spend.. maybe for some additional advantage during a run?

As for the player needing an incentive to create a run.. well, there could be many reasons. Maybe someone needs a body part from an Hellhound for ''tradeskilling'' a spell, or as I mentioned before, an Urban Brawl player has a lot of nuyen riding on his next game, and wants to sabotage the competition. Spending 10,000 Nuyen on a group of runners to ensure that you win the 150,000 First-Place prize in Urban Brawl sounds like a pretty good deal to me, especially if you're not exactly sure if your team will be able to win.

You don't need to create "favor" points, as we already have a system in place for Notoriety and the like. You could just build off of that. Kind of like WoW factions, where you get some discounts or access to items for being at a certain factor level. I think Season 4 of Missions is putting a factor-like tracking device into the adventures.

The only thing I don't like about the sabotage for Urban Brawl thing is the auto-win. I could see some runs being devised to give an advantage that would affect the Urban Brawl player in real-time in his next match, but not something that he would get an auto-win. Maybe a percentage increase/decrease in stats, up to a certain threshold...

Responding to the emphasized sentence:

Not necessarily. City of Heroes introduced their Player Created Missions system a couple years ago, and in the space of two days after launching it had players generate three times as much content as the Devs had created in the previous four years.

There's a lot of folks who like to do this kinda thing, even without a personal reward.



-k

That is good to hear, KarmaInferno. I "get" that as I am a GM in about any game I play and derive my enjoyment out of the creative aspect. I just wouldn't have figured such high production of content in a game...but I suppose just being rewarded by being known as making good content (i.e. fame) is enough incentive.

Well, my personal view of a StreetCred/Rep/Notoriety system was indeed factional in a sense, but also more ''passive''.. meaning things like discounts and such. What I perceive as ''favor points'' would be more active... say utilizing 15 favor points to call in the local go-gang that owes you to help get someone off your tail or something similar.

I don't necessarily mean an ''auto-win''. I was thinking along the lines of, say.. hiring a hacker to sabotage one of the bikes or set a worm in it. It puts one team at a large disadvantage, but they can still come back and win it somehow.. and that's not counting the other team trying to ''underhandedly'' win the match too. If the team knows that say, one of the Urban Brawl team members likes to go clubbing on his days off to maybe meet new people or potential recruits, they could try and find him there and narcojet him with some drug that would seriously reduce his performance. Not necessarily something that could auto-win the team, such as straight-up assassination (though, if the pay is good enough.. why not?)

Granted. A lot of that content was people trying out the system with no regard to quality. It was also a lot of content being created to make farming really easy or to really hasten exp gains.

Remember that a lot of missions in CoH use a random "dungeon" generator to create the level.

Prior to that I had been playing for about 4 years, and a few characters around 40, and 2 50s.

Then came the great Rikti Communicator Invasion of 2009...happy times...I could get to level 38 in 8 hours. When you level you get a buff for up to 1 minute. At point I had three of these buffs concurrently...happy times.
This was then followed by a period of a few months of people producing optimised missions for xp. What ever the developers tried...the swarm tactics of the players, many trying to optimised xp/hour produced universally dull dungeon.

The point of that small piece of history is that players optimised xp/hr almost whatever you do (unless you go for an Eve style xp system which for me is the worst of all worlds YMMV)

I think you can have a player driven content system, but it would have to be different to COX.

Yeah, the concept was great, but the Devs there clearly underestimated the player base's ability and willingness to exploit bugs and design flaws.

There was also the Great Snow Beast XP Hunt.

As I stated earlier, the best thing about MMOs is the players. The worst thing about MMOs is also the players.




-k

EVE Online's system for XP is actually rather ingenious. With the exception of skill levels that serve as prerequisites, the functional difference between the benefit of Lv4 and Lv5 is so low it's not a huge deal. Lv3 to Lv5 isn't that much better. However the training time to go from Lv3-Lv4 is SIGNIFICANTLY less than Lv4-Lv5. Lv1-Lv4 don't take that much time, it's Lv5 skills where you see the huge time investment.

I'm looking at a Rank 10 skill for piloting a single very specific ship.
Lv1 - 4,500 Skill Points - 29m
Lv2 - 11,643 Skill Points - 59m
Lv3 - 65,857 Skill Points - 4h 37m
Lv4 - 372,549 Skill Points - 1d 2h 8m
Lv5 - 2,107,451 Skill Points - 34d 20h 17m

This particular skill you can get away with Lv1 although Lv3 is trivial to train for the benefit you gain. Lv4 is pushing it a bit on how worthwhile it is to train, and Lv5 is only there for people that want to max out and nothing better to spend training time on. The only reason I'm considering Lv5 of that skill on the character is because it's an alt with two roles that have are near the maximum potentials and I have a whole bunch of skill points that I had refunded to me with a recent patch.

The problem outsiders have with EVE Online's skill system is that they misunderstand it. The major advantage to it is that it doesn't require you to personally grind anything (aside from the isk necessary to purchase the skills you want to learn). You don't have to be logged in. Your character develops regardless of if your playing. The thing that is incorrectly seen about the skill system is lv5 in skills. People see lv5, they don't realize that they don't need it because their gameplay experiences dictate to them that the top is the best and they don't necessarily realize that the cost/benefit ratio of those lv5 skills is so low that there are very few worthwhile reasons to gain the max. This is in direct opposition to the common MMO mindset where you have to maximize your statistics regardless of how little that benefit is compared to the cost. The EVE system also means that I can take a break from the game whenever I feel like it, and as long as my account is active I can gain growth on my character with almost no intervention outside of making sure my skill queue doesn't run empty.

I could also go into a psychological rant about how most humans are impatient and want everything now, but that is neither here nor there.

I still remember having to constantly log into EVE to set the next skill to train.

You got to the point where you'd fret about wasted minutes where your character had finished one rank of a skill and was idling waiting for you to log in to tell it what skill to train next.






-k

I'm guessing that was back when there wasn't a skill queue in the game? Now you can set up to 24hours worth of skills to train. Plop EVEMon onto one of your PCs and you can be well aware of when your queue has empty space. It's no where near as horrid as it used to be. And they've gotten rid of Learning skills, so there's no longer the emphasis on starting your new character off with training all those damn skills to optimize your SP/hr before you start training other things.

At this point, the only bad thing that could be say is that you can't learn skills faster by grinding and that the queue is only 24hrs. I would definitely love it if they expanded the queue to about 72 hours.

Even SR has training times for skills. Most groups seem to ignore them, but I remember training times dating back to the 1st edition of AD&D. The nice thing about the eve system is you are limited by your skills on your equipment. The sad thing is once you get your core skills up then you find you are taking level 5s just because.

I don't mind training time for skills: although I think that using skills under stress (i.e. adventuring counts too.

On a negative note: My problems with the Eve model of training is

• Why bother playing... you get xp whether you play or not
• Why bother playing well...you xp whether you play crapply or well
• I like games in which there are archetypes, and I like to explore many of the archetypes.

I could actually carry on, (and I could go on about other things: Eve has a maximum velocity in space! and a lousy physics model and other off topic ideas..) but as I say YMMV. Imagine though playing pnp shadowrun, with only the same character ever. I like long running campaigns, but I also like variety.

On a positive note: every play Vampire: masquerade (the computer game). If you finished missions you got xp. The harder the mission the more the xp. It didnt matter if you stealthed, faced, fought or cheated...you just had to finish the mission. That was I thought the best model I've played.