katriell wrote:
What is content?
Seriously.
Oh great
I do think that rehashing this beaten-to-death "oh what's content" phylosophical (sp?) argument is better than having almost no post to read while b@w.
It does bring me back old-memories of "grimjimesque" eternalish threads and snobbishky assumptions, so let's see what's next. I'll play a bit the devil's avocate here but let me state that there are lots of ways of basically "having fun in a MMRPG" on no one is better than the others
* 99% of MMRPG players may think that they have a solid understanding of what "content" means, or at least there seems to exist a common reasonable consensus (including, possibly, quests, new races, new items, new lands, new entities, more stories, new event arcs, etc.), yet there is always someone willing to pick on the word, just to point out that content can include other meanings and it is an open word, which is a noble thing to do, or, maybe without intention, to dismiss what, imho, could be a valid point.
* attitude A: "I can be entertained for months smelling the roses and counting the spots in a varynx skin, I can dream of adventures while looking at those pixels in the form of a rock (it does not matter that the 3D designer actually cut& pasted hundreds of square meters of trees) and I can roleplay that I am decorating a castle with a brown paper box. It is virtually impossible that you are bored after 8 months of playing. Surely you must have been doing something really bad, or your way of playing stinks. It's your problem."
* Variant of attitude A: "I have been playing for 6 years, 5 hours a day and I always find plenty of things to do, and my levels are below 17, all. See how cool I am? begone, you fool, simpleton, how do you dare to get bored while there are soooooo many entertaining and interesting things to do... such as classifying atysian insects by they nighty feeding habits!, this is such a wonderful setting world!!!. You probably rushed to have your first 250 in 2 years, so don't cry if you burn the game that fast"
* Attitude B: "I'd rather have live events and interesting story arcs than any stoopid ´save-the-princess-again´ quest" (no joke, seriusly, so would a lot of people, but ya know, they don't need to be mutually exclusive... and I would rather save-the-princess-again if I wanted to rather than writing poetry about the old fisherhomin that used to live in the fount, while he handcrafted wooden statues -- with all due respect to poetry loving players, your call- or maybe it happens that there are no live events right now that I have some spare time to play)
* "Any content addition will be consumed by players in a few hours/days, and they'll be soon asking for more content additions EEERGO, no content addition is better than any content addition" (I must admit, this one is tricky.. I am still unable to grab it too :confused
. A more elaborate version is "EEERGO, we should focus on durable content additions" so there will be no content additions while we try to figure out what half-baked shortsighted durable content addition we can add.
* "My way of playing is sooo much emore elaborate and better than yours since I roleplay, smell the roses, write poetry and can name all the umphteen ancient matisian kings in reverse order with their birth days in ancient written fyrosian language and yet you just want to "kill mobs".
Just shaking things a bit, but I would like to state that it is a bit of a shame that everytime that someone complains about the lack of content (whatever your flavor-definition-of-the-day for that word) etc. needs to face a row of canned answers.
Acknowledging that there may be some truth in what the player says, and discussing with an open mind... and not caricaturing the players as dumb "youwin-button" pushers, ignorants that need to be told what to do, insensitive quest-repeaters and gold-farmers, totally lacking in lots of aspects in what some think to be the "true and only way of playing a MMRPG", may be a sensitive thing ?
(yes, mine is also a canned answer)
Yours,
Ani
)