More on MMOs

First, I am still enjoying Conan, though, if you read the forums for the game, you'd think I was the only one. Guess those that enjoy something do it, while most of the whiners post on the forums.

That's not to say there aren't some happy posters, there are, and those are the posts I actually read.

I have noticed something in many of the adventure MMOs that does frustrate me. It is the Killing = Experience = Leveling = "goals". There seems to be little thought given to other methods of character advancement. Why not give more experience for persuasion, sneaky things, and cooperation and making killing the last ditch strategy of the incapable? I'm not suggesting this for every MMO, because I like to randomly kill things once in a while too. It's just not what I want every adventure to be about.

I suppose one reason is it is simpler to create an "us" and a "them" to thump on and then let the players spend most of their time killing randomly re-spawning beasties. It take lots of time to create intricate and involved story-line content. This was the difficulty faced by the Myst Online: Uru Live team. And I've seen it just messing around with the content creator for Neverwinter Nights. Good NPC conversations and intricate story take a lot longer than painting an area and populating it with beasties.

Still, the table-top RPGs I enjoyed the most emphasized story and intrigue over just killing things and grabbing loot. Maybe that was why it was hard to find consistent gamers. Fortunately, I have found several that enjoy that kind of scenario, so we meet every two weeks to solve the problems of that particular campaign.

To use the too-oft-used song line: "If I were a rich person..." I'd develop an MMO that fit my ideals and hope to get enough non-traditional players to make it go.