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Ever wondered what happened to roleplaying in MMO's?
Scot
Member LegendaryPosts: 22,955
"Role-playing is easily supported by a development team, but often overlooked. Since there is no “carrot” at the end of the RP stick, it doesn’t attract a lot of players, and therefore goes under the radar of most game developers."
Says it all really.
http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/7274/page/1
Comments
I agree, for me RP in MMO's has always been third rate when compaired to PnP. But I have had some great times doing it, so I don't do a lot but have done some in every MMO I have played.
The question is, how can RP in MMO's ever get better when we are so far down the design prioity list, if on it at all? We will be stuck in RP guilds playing a game within a game until that changes.
This is extremely true.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Yep. Expensive, no obvious fast return on investment. A pretty typical response from a corporation, really.
The cost of ignoring it (in terms of the depth of your world, socialization of your player base) are not easy to estimate. Corporations aren't really capable of considering the long term damage.
Dinosaurs. We can make a fast buck off the pvp guys instead, don't need ya. Door's right over there.
S'all right, my bard performed, and that memory is always going to make me smile. And the game universe changed because I was there.
That game entertained me for ten years...what's a ten-year customer worth to you, corporate bean-counters? My record time for MMO's is in the neighborhood of five. What's your average churn rate right now?
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Will personally i feel that Rp'ing should only need be included in your character selection.After all that is what you are doing in a game is role playing that character.So to make that happen you need to give the players more choice as in being able to role play the creatures in the game or perhaps even the NPC's.I think EQ2 did it the best having languages,it just could have been better yet.
I have actually had some funny encounters just role playing the chat with other players.This one chick was Rp'ing so i joined in and i think by end of it ,i made her BF mad lol.I guess all we need is a white hanky to insult thy foul cursed being,then to draw swords wha sah !,on guard foul scum :P Then the fair maiden can tell her trusty steed...YOU SUCK !
.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I RP'd in CoX, almost all the time. BY that I mean, I spoke "in character", always. There were tons and tons of players who did.
Helped that every character was unique, hard to RP when there are hundreds of you standing around. I also think the pace of games is too fast now to RP, unless you want to stand in the bar and tell someone your sob story, booooooooo.
Also when a game doesn't have actual roles and everyone has the same purpose, roleplaying is not about to happen. The game needs to offer options to take on a role, to be different from others, not just by typing "I am a butterfly collector" but to allow You to be a butterfly collector.
Class can be a starting point for roleplaying, and it is very typical for a healer to stop and heal someone on the way to a raid even if they are in a hurry and could have ran by - That is also roleplay. Others take it further, but only if they have some freedom to fit a role into the game.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
I used to love RP in games, back when WoW first came out, i jumped on an RP server for the hell of it.
Vorpal, every day roguish human with no real background....at face value.
Get on his wrong side and next thing you know SI:7 is after you.
Or in SW:toR, Blesain Varisia. Twilek working for the Sith in order to get information of every jedi still alive.
But she is highly conflicted and her superiors are concerned about her leniency towards her subjects
Those are my 2 fondest memories, and while they didnt last long, they were still good fun.
They are what drove me back to pen and paper for DnD, where my mates would meet up and have no choice except to be who their characters were.
What happened to it is that most of us never wanted it. I've played MMOs from the beginning and have never wanted to roleplay in the sense that is being talked about here and generally avoided roleplayers simply for the fact I wanted to be able to talk and act normal with those who I was grouping with.
I'm already playing a role by being a character who isn't me and who has a specific set of skills. If I'm healing for a group, I'm playing the role of a healer. I don't see the need to go beyond that and talk in Old English or act like the real world doesn't exist and all of that stuff. Most people simply aren't into that.
Roleplaying is much deeper than just playing a role for me.
Like others have pointed out, RP is not a quantifiable quantity (read: easily chargeable). Except for a few cosmetic items that many Roleplayers will not like for their character, or selling "emote packages", what else can a company charge for? Well, longevity with a sub comes to mind, but nobody wants that
PS: A good thread to necro, Althewiseguy
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Ever play an MMO that could demand (and get) sixty bones a month? (A couple of nutbags racked up bills breaking a thousand, while still on AOL/hourly rates)
Players like a staff that's involved and events that are not predictable, yes, they do.
But the payroll cost is real and a couple of orders of magnitude bigger. 1 GM per 500 players, instead of 1 per 50000. And you've got to get your staff interacting directly with players, mmo theory sees that as Liability.
You accept awful customer service and dead worlds as a matter of course, because of Scale.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
::bow::
It's not like the role players could be creative and somehow make their own emote. This makes me sad.
:
Ever wonder what role players did back in muds? They rolled around in the dirt.
:
So do RPers need the devs to give them tools to role play or do role players need to step up their game. ::ponders::
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Ever wondered what happened to roleplaying in MMO's?
Not really.
What happend is Online Combat Oriented Games.
The RP in MMORPG is not a reference to people socially roleplaying or even roleplaying the character you play in the game.It refers to the conventions and tropes of the CRPG game genre that have existed since the first Wizardry,ultima,might and magic,dungeon master etc games were conceived to mimic the rules and conventions of PnP RPGs in single player video game form.The phrase was first coined by Richard Garriot in reference to taking his single player Ultima CRPG series online with many players playing at once.
I have nothing against players wanting to roleplay in MMORPGs to try and immerse themselves more,more power to them and they should be left alone to enjoy the game the way they want to.Bu to turn around what you said to SnarlingWolf any game with a chat system and multiplayer is by definition a MMORPG even if it's just pong with skype built in.
Why would we need to, with both /act and /smile both being completely open-ended (user defined) verbs?
Not limited to a single animation (see: emote).
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
another issue is that consensus on character driven content is difficult to achieve at times. while i have certainly enjoyed my random moments of rp running across someone in the open world or at the local tavern, the ability to combine how we both see the world of our roleplay can be very difficult indeed.
this is often where a gamemaster or dungeonmaster would step in and be able to offer some guidance and refereeing about the world they have placed you in and how it might or might not relate to the world you are creating with your other roleplayer.
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in the end we have yet to truly see the conversion of tabletop to an online game, massive or not, in any broad sense of the term. yes there was, and still is, the Neverwinter series with its various mods to allow select groups of people to explore together.
my dream is a virtual Faerun mmo style server of my own that i can open up to as many or as few people as i want. run one or many story arcs or campaigns and have that world changeable by the players themselves and myself.
"There are at least two kinds of games.
One could be called finite, the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning,
an infinite game for the purpose of continuing play."
Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse
Yup, we did a fair bit of roleplay on AIM, actually. But the props, staff and events do undeniably help.
Really no point in trying to explain it; you either experienced it, or you confuse RP with cybersex and shakespeare. And the MMO generation really has no idea what they missed.
You really should grumble about the horrid customer service you receive daily, though.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
"There are at least two kinds of games.
One could be called finite, the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning,
an infinite game for the purpose of continuing play."
Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse
Like you say such RP communities existed online before MMORPGs if you wandered around any site with chat rooms like say old school Yahoo you'd trip over dozens of different RP communities.Hell there are still hundreds of IRC chat rooms that house said communities.
MMORPGs like said chat rooms were in no way designed with these communities in mind.They do now cater to do them to varying degrees because they are a large consumer group but they have nothing to do with the naming or covnentions of the MMORPG genre.That is the point I was trying to make.
Or putting on a Dwarf outfit, or (heaven forbid) an avatar with bewbs.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
And the point this thread's trying to make
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Agreed but I was responding to a post that seemed to say otherwise and there are people who do believe otherwise and they must all individually be told they are wrong!!!!Even if I have to visit them all one by one Jay and Silent Bob Style!!!