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Do Auction Houses Suck?
His conclusion:
"Every inconvenience is a challenge, and games are made of challenges. This means that every inconvenience in your design is potentially someone’s game."
http://www.raphkoster.com/2012/03/20/do-auction-houses-suck/#more-4080
Why isn't this guy making MMORPGs anymore?
Once upon a time....
Comments
No one wants mmorpgs. Its not that he isn't making mmorpgs, its that NO ONE is making mmorpgs. Or rather, no one is making virtual worlds. Which is what we have to call them now because mmorpg no longer means anything.
This part is particularly lovely written:
"The small shopkeepers; the socializers who need the extra five minutes you have to spend waiting for a boat at the Everquest docks; the players who live to help, and can’t once every item is soul bound and every fight is group locked and they can’t even step in to save your life; the role player who cannot be who they wish to be because their dialogue is prewritten; the person proud of his knowledge of the dangerous mountains who is bypassed by a teleporter; the person who wants to be lost in the woods and cannot because there is a mini-map."
Dammit, SWG nostalgia got me again.
NEW IDEAS that can refresh the STALE state of MMORPGs
Unfortunately, he has kinda sold out on some of his older opinions in other ways..
At another MMO site he came on and was talking about how things need to be waterdown these days to get "mainstream appeal" and a "broad customer base" because you have to in order to get the funding to get the games made.
And he more or less accepted that as how things are now and was fine with it, so should he ever be involved with another MMO project, I will be wary of how things actually are in there, not going to buy because he was a designer/developer....
He is sort of right. Any AAA game does need mainstream appeal. I think its more that Koster is too greedy to work on an indie game. I don't blame him. Why would he work for barely any money if he didn't have to? But yes he has effectively sold out.
Not that there are any other game designers who are any different. Except maybe Notch. Giving all his minecraft money to mojang employees or w/e.
Very nice article. If only...
Whatever to think about R. Koster himself - I just agree with his article.
"Every inconvenience is someone else's game" - damn that just brilliant statement. Kinda exactly describe what I was trying to explain sometimes to some people I was arguing about certain features / design of mmorpg's.
Indeed. Koster can certainly turn a phrase.
Yep. He's a silver tongued bastage, that's for sure.
As far as what he's been doing, I think he just wanted to get away from the MMO scene for a while. He likes to make games, and I think he wanted to explore the wider aspects of that. Particularly the social stuff. Say what you want, that social arena is fascinating in where it will go as technology grows and allows for games like what we are used to done there. Sure, a few years away yet, but technology moves so fast. I'm an older guy, and I never thought I'd live to see an MMORPG in my lifetime. Yet it happened, and grew, and changed, and explored the edges and busted out of the "magic bubble" (a Koster explanation). Now, it's ready to be fine tuned, and maybe he sees that.
Maybe he's thinking about some new possibilities now. Who knows. For myself, I'd love to see the original UO crew get back together and show us where the new boundaries are.
Once upon a time....
Yeah he can talk.....what he cant do is make an MMO that appeals to many folks.
You guys are welcome to buy his apps though on Facebook.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
You are kind of cherry picking his words. He did mention that SWG added SERVERWIDE auction houses. If it wasn't serverwide you would have essentially the same ecomony as before, but players wouldn't be wasting time searching through shops.
Props to Koster for starting in UO and SWG. Maybe one day he'll actually see a game through. That'll be a treat.
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
It's pretty common in the game industry that lead designers (especially those as talented as Koster) work on a game and see it launch, make some core improvements and changes within a short window of time, then hand the reigns over to others and move on to new projects.
In Raph's case, he left UO to work on SWG. He left SWG for EQ2/indepedent pursuits (possibly knowing that changes like NGE were in the pipeline and wanting no part of it... no idea). Still, while some devs stick with a project for its life, I bet it's actually quite rare.
Koster is more of an idea man than a dev.
Like Brad McQuaid, without the coke habit and lunacy.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
It seems Koster is waiting for MUD/VW-style online games to be popular again before he gets back into them. Metaplace was a great social experiment and a neat world, but most players today don't really want a game world and, as was pointed out earlier, it's hard to get funding for the more niche projects.
I'd really like to see him revisit the Metaplace idea, and I have a feeling that if he does it will be with a more mobile-focused system. I doubt his next project will be like UO or SWG - in theme, at least - as the classic genres seem to create the expectation of game rather than world. It would probably be another modern or alternate reality endeavor.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Someday, we will have a game with some depth and room for a wide variety of playstyles (I hope).
This line made me laugh:
For someone who just wanted to frickin’ buy a blaster, it was very inconvenient.
It's so true. There are just people who rush through everything to the end. They crunch the numbers and min/max. They want the most epic epic. It's just a fact.
There are others of us who want a world that is full of potential and mystery. I think there are enough of us to support a game like that, and probably we can pay enough to make the publisher who does it right quite successful. But that publisher has to love the game more than the bottom line. That's the problem.
It was a great read. Thanks, OP, for bringing it to our attention.
He's (Koster) right, you know. You can make fire with a matches, or you could make fire without them using sticks or whatever. But if the game isn't called "Making Fire", there's little reason not use a matches. Is making fire with sticks all the game is or does it bring something to the rest of the game?
Is Skyrim about adventuring, killing monsters, finding wondrous things and saving the world or is it about watering, feeding and petting your horse? Does cutting the tamagotchi add to the adventuring? Some backseat developers should think on this. Some features are merely an inconvenience (like the tamagotchi and Koster's example) but others are more severe like open world PvP.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Yeah Brad went off the deep end, but his ideas were more conforming to take MMOs out of the niche realm.
Koster gave a roleplay stage. Great if you were a PnP enthusiest in your youth, but something that doesnt catch on that well otherwise. Brad went for the PVE angle, and it proved to be popular.
A sober Brad trumps Koster everyday of the week IMO. Hopefully he cleans his act up.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
One of the minds behind what many consider one of the most innovative and best mmos of all time. The Dev cycle is starting to show a lot of hybrid and sandbox games in development, would be nice to see him work with one in the near future.
Because he hasn't had a new idea in years. He's also wrong, again. Difficult things that make you want to do them are challenges. Inconvieniences are annoying. Killing a difficult mob with teamwork and precision for great rewad is a challenge. Being forced to kill 5,000 slow spawning widely separated trash mobs solo just so you can advance is an inconvienience. Do you see the difference? He doesn't and never has.
You must be joking McGrind was a hack, he never understood the difference between 'hardcore' and boring, monotonous, repetative. Camping for more than a day straight for a must have item (Jboots), grinding endlessly to advance, huge enforced downtimes (meditating between fights). Some of the things in EQ where truly egricious and a real dumbing down from the MUDs that inspired it. I think he (through EQ) set the genre back years. Just my opinion, such a shame that AO or DAoC (which where a bit later) could not really wrestle the commercial crown away from EQ.
I don't play Facebook games. The only I was ever serious about was Mousehunt. But it got old. And people paid to win. I barely use facebook at all. Even my status is more like a twitter account.
Lol, you obviously did not actually read the blog, or did not understand it. Sometimes, silence is golden...
I suggest reading your own signature.
People like you don't play games to experience them, you play them in an effort to be as good at them as possible. The difference is that in the latter you're inclined to ignore anything that doesn't contribute to gear/leveling and in the former you care about everything that makes the MMORPG genre unique. Unfortunately that 'everything' has been reduced to 'almost nothing' in most games these days.
The true strength that is specific to MMORPG's is that you can make a virtual world where thousands of people meaningfully interact in a multitude of different ways. But most MMO's these days severely limit the number of ways you can interact with the world at large. In other words, MMO's are less MMO than they used to be and much more like shallow single-player games. Basically they're the worst of both worlds. However, There are good prospects on the horizon but there always are....