Ryzom

first lets look at its name . mmorpg. what does it mean. well it stands for
Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game

so we are looking at games wich are online where lots of people join to a server to role play.

this statment is so silly but so true ..

a mmorpg must have a large player count where players join the game to role play with other players.

this statment was once very true. i know its not the first mmorpg but its at the start of it all. Ultima online.

im sure some of you have played it. now when this game came out there was no levels, sure you could raise some skills etc but it was more that you were role playing.

an emaple when i first played UO i logged in and somebody just outside of the town was attacking a goat , he then ran past me shouting "help! the goat is angry. please kill it or it will kill me"
that one moment had me hooked on mmopgs, it wasnt the fact you can kill goats more the fact that it was another world. There i stood in a town never before playing a online game and a man runs past me asking for my help. i replyed and he spoke back. it was more like the game had magic npcs which you could chat to and not select pre-set ansers. i played that game for 1 year never leveling much just enjoying roleplaying.

i then moved to asherons call had the same joy. also again in anarchy online.


now the magic is gone. and this is why..

you had to pay a small monthy fee just to keep the servers up and the dev team in a job. now in many mmorpgs that money never goes fully back into the game. servers are cheap and easy to run now.

there is about 50 mmorpgs now all fighting over the same 10,000 players give or take a few, and i have noticed that most of these are buy companys who dont love role playing but who love the idea of getting 1000's of $$$ every month without having to launch a new game.

but that shoudnt be a problem if they kept new content going. most dont bother they will make a game dump it on the market before its finished and then wait for the big influx of people get rich quick and spend the cash on the dev of a new game (of corse i dont mean this to be directed at ryzom)

there is only 2 games where i have seen a dev team which wants the game to have new content and a good roleplay aspect. they are AO and EQ. if you hate or love them thats not the point (myself i hate eq) the fact is they push new places/content etc evey 4 or 5 months.

all that said people look too hard into the bussness side of mmorpgs today.
look at pen and paper D&D if you played that.. did you spend your time sitting about saying " the paper for the book isnt very good i bet they are spending our money on a new book and not better paper" of corse that made no sense but what most of "us" mmorpg players complain about dosnt make sense ever. the dev team V the players.. where did all that start?


so the truth behind the mmorpg..


they are all going down hill fast. there is two reasons for this.


the first is the dev teams in 99% of mmorpgs have lost there way. they focus on numbers they balance they tweak they change and patch and bug fix ..
they forget that day when they all sat around the meeting table and all got excited about a game what could be and the storys it would tell. the devs forgot the dream .

the second is the players me included. we have lost our way as well we have forgot the deam. we buy a mmorpg and we grind we lvl we watch the numbers and the damage bar we become zombies...
we dont make background storys to our chrs anymore we dont role play we dont do anything which doesnt get us xp. we find a bug and we focus on it we find an exploit and use it. we dont follow the story or even ask for one anymore we just want easy leveling and fast killing. we spend 20 mins making a chr and giving it a good name but never speek in character.



there is only one way of putting the magic into playing mmorpgs again.

the DEV team needs to stop looking at the payer population , the money each month , the numbers, the power of monster etc they need to forget all that and start to tell a story. and they need to keep it fast constanty changing, evey day something new has happend in the mmorpg world they are a dev for. players will come money will come if you live your dreams you once had about your game.

and the players need to soak up the story and role play. forget about levels forget about being a high level because in a mmorpg there is no end game you wont win . you need to sit back and become part of the story.

---------------------------------------------

sorry if its abit long but thats how i see things. devs rember the dream you once had and players rember you cannot finish the game.

lordzren wrote:first lets look at its name . mmorpg. what does it mean. well it stands for
Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game

so we are looking at games wich are online where lots of people join to a server to role play.

this statment is so silly but so true ..

a mmorpg must have a large player count where players join the game to role play with other players.

this statment was once very true. i know its not the first mmorpg but its at the start of it all. Ultima online.

im sure some of you have played it. now when this game came out there was no levels, sure you could raise some skills etc but it was more that you were role playing.

an emaple when i first played UO i logged in and somebody just outside of the town was attacking a goat , he then ran past me shouting "help! the goat is angry. please kill it or it will kill me"
that one moment had me hooked on mmopgs, it wasnt the fact you can kill goats more the fact that it was another world. There i stood in a town never before playing a online game and a man runs past me asking for my help. i replyed and he spoke back. it was more like the game had magic npcs which you could chat to and not select pre-set ansers. i played that game for 1 year never leveling much just enjoying roleplaying.

i then moved to asherons call had the same joy. also again in anarchy online.


now the magic is gone. and this is why..

you had to pay a small monthy fee just to keep the servers up and the dev team in a job. now in many mmorpgs that money never goes fully back into the game. servers are cheap and easy to run now.

there is about 50 mmorpgs now all fighting over the same 10,000 players give or take a few, and i have noticed that most of these are buy companys who dont love role playing but who love the idea of getting 1000's of $$$ every month without having to launch a new game.

but that shoudnt be a problem if they kept new content going. most dont bother they will make a game dump it on the market before its finished and then wait for the big influx of people get rich quick and spend the cash on the dev of a new game (of corse i dont mean this to be directed at ryzom)

there is only 2 games where i have seen a dev team which wants the game to have new content and a good roleplay aspect. they are AO and EQ. if you hate or love them thats not the point (myself i hate eq) the fact is they push new places/content etc evey 4 or 5 months.

all that said people look too hard into the bussness side of mmorpgs today.
look at pen and paper D&D if you played that.. did you spend your time sitting about saying " the paper for the book isnt very good i bet they are spending our money on a new book and not better paper" of corse that made no sense but what most of "us" mmorpg players complain about dosnt make sense ever. the dev team V the players.. where did all that start?


so the truth behind the mmorpg..


they are all going down hill fast. there is two reasons for this.


the first is the dev teams in 99% of mmorpgs have lost there way. they focus on numbers they balance they tweak they change and patch and bug fix ..
they forget that day when they all sat around the meeting table and all got excited about a game what could be and the storys it would tell. the devs forgot the dream .

the second is the players me included. we have lost our way as well we have forgot the deam. we buy a mmorpg and we grind we lvl we watch the numbers and the damage bar we become zombies...
we dont make background storys to our chrs anymore we dont role play we dont do anything which doesnt get us xp. we find a bug and we focus on it we find an exploit and use it. we dont follow the story or even ask for one anymore we just want easy leveling and fast killing. we spend 20 mins making a chr and giving it a good name but never speek in character.



there is only one way of putting the magic into playing mmorpgs again.

the DEV team needs to stop looking at the payer population , the money each month , the numbers, the power of monster etc they need to forget all that and start to tell a story. and they need to keep it fast constanty changing, evey day something new has happend in the mmorpg world they are a dev for. players will come money will come if you live your dreams you once had about your game.

and the players need to soak up the story and role play. forget about levels forget about being a high level because in a mmorpg there is no end game you wont win . you need to sit back and become part of the story.

---------------------------------------------

sorry if its abit long but thats how i see things. devs rember the dream you once had and players rember you cannot finish the game.

I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said in this post =)

varelse wrote:I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said in this post =)

thanks nice to know im not alone

Actually, MUDs predate UO. I still want to pimp slap the guy who decided MMORPG was easier to say than MUD.

One thing to add - it is not necessarily about role playing. The people that "role play" in these games are far and few between, and they always have been. You'll especially see that if you look a little further back into the history of MUDS, who, truly were the first "MMORPGS". Well, maybe with one M given the 200-300 players per mud. You had all different kinds of flavours, DikuMuds, Mushes, Muses, LPMuds - all with a different focus. Some were mostly roleplay oriented, some more hack-and-slash-get-the-treasure style, some PvP ...

In the end - you will need a little bit of everything.

ctusk wrote:One thing to add - it is not necessarily about role playing. The people that "role play" in these games are far and few between, and they always have been. You'll especially see that if you look a little further back into the history of MUDS, who, truly were the first "MMORPGS". Well, maybe with one M given the 200-300 players per mud. You had all different kinds of flavours, DikuMuds, Mushes, Muses, LPMuds - all with a different focus. Some were mostly roleplay oriented, some more hack-and-slash-get-the-treasure style, some PvP ...

In the end - you will need a little bit of everything.

true muds were fun . but even they have more of a story even the hack and slash ones you talk about. often they were set around quests etc. didnt play a mud where all you did was run around killing the same thing. normaly it was quest to get x item etc.

also devs of the old mud games were in it for the love of there idea not to make lots of quick cash

I always find it funny when people throw UO.

UO was the first major MMORPG. It is still one of the most complex MMOGs out there. However it never had any of the content so many people complain about. The players made over 75% of the content for the game. The rest was from the GM's and Seers.

lordzren is correct when saying that the players of MMOGs have changed. Most of us have become sheep and it is really sad. However there is also the issue of the people making these games giving into wants of the players who really didnt understand what they were asking for. Now I am going to touch on a system that even UO removed .. Open PvP where you can attack and kill anyone at any time. There are side effects, but you could actually play the part of the bad guy. Since there are always people out there willing to play the bad guy, it tends to give the other players something to fight against. It adds the conflict that everyone seems to want. If we were fighting eachother, would the Kitin really need to raid the cities? No, we would have much more exciting battles to fight.

If that were the case i'd shoot anyone that looked at me cockeyed.

open PvP is risky. very hard to pull off. not to mention the bigger guilds would become all powerful.

euwest wrote:open PvP is risky. very hard to pull off. not to mention the bigger guilds would become all powerful.

looking at pvp in asherons call 1 on there pvp server.

you had a few big guilds who would kill all the low lvl players making it hard for them to level.

the result was a stong role play aspect where the new players grouped together and made a guild to help new players. a few months down the line the new player zones were defended and the players out there to kill anyone they could were pushed back into a few main towns.

was alot of fun you didnt level that fast but was so fun defending somebody who was very new and just trying to get the hang of the game.