@Darth/Breaka: The Free-to-play MMO “Sword of the New World” does allow you to play with multiple characters simultaneously, in a party set-up. In fact, it’s really the only way to play that game.

However, the entire game is one giant grind, and the ‘play’ is dominated by all of the ultra high levels who have paid real-money to unlock the best gear and the highest levels for their characters. Free players are restricted to lowever levels and lesser gear.

I wouldn’t recommend it, personally.

@Darth: As you may know, The Old Republic is entirely lost on me. I’ve seen at least 30 minutes of coverage with an open mind and every thing I watch makes me more and more apathetic.

@Lusipurr, Ethos, Breaka: For me, that MMO’s The Old Republic, even though it doesn’t look like it does anything revolutionary with the gameplay. I’ve just been ignoring most FFXIV news out of habit, but maybe I should look into it. I know I’ve got a friend who’s always bothering my to try new MMOs…

@Breaka: I can’t say for sure if it’s a joke, but I’ve seen it from a few different sources (granted, they were pretty much all of the same level of legitimacy as the one I linked to). Even if it isn’t legit, that concept’s always been something that’s interested me, but AFAIK there’s no MMO that will let you take 2 of your characters and party them together (short of this guy’s method of running multiple WoW instances on multiple machines, which I don’t really have the budget for).

@Lusipurr & Ethos: same here. my fingers are crossed that the beta is gonna be open.

@DarthGibblet: Jesus tapdancing Christ! that’s a joke right? It has to be…

I second that. I have never been excited for an MMO until FFXIV. It seems to be doing a lot of things right.

@Breaka: The more I hear about FFXIV, the more I like it.

Regarding skill ups instead of level ups I believe the team working on FF XIV is actually doing that. and to reduce grinding they did away with auto-attack and replaced it with a variety of standard attacks you have to input manually against monsters that learn patterns.

http://www.ffxivcore.com/index.php?/topic/909-dengeki-interview-with-tanaka-and-sundi/

you didn’t happen to be involved in it’s development, were you?

yea we call it “the dark ages” when he was addicted to WoW, he has been clean for a few months now he goes to a support group the nights he used to have raids. he also has a novel in the works, the working title is “When WoW was just an exclamation and not an addicting drug”

Is that first picture of Oliver Motok?

It is possible that I can make the podcast this week because the judges are on vacation and I don’t have a trial on Monday. I added pictures to break up my Dread Wall of Text (it has plus one mindnumbing!).

These ideas are just cobbled together from my shower+thinking sessions about how I’d design a game to include the fun parts but not the boring parts. I think too many of these mechanics are holdovers from the last generation’s way of thinking about emerging gameplay, that if you make the “special” content easily accessible you somehow ruin it. I think XBox Live has taught us that accessibility isn’t the problem as long as it is possible to differentiate in skill.

Case in point, from tonight’s WoW session, while I was sidelined to let others gear up in the main raid, I PUGed a dungeon with a really fantastically terrible group. And I don’t mean terrible in the sense that I could have educated them on a better strategy: I mean one guy kept deliberately wiping us on an easy boss because he thought it was funny to dash into the adds and send a bunch of them aggroed onto me (the tank). His response: “Lul I hit my auotrun.” (post not edited for grammatical accuracy). Even though this chowderhead was in gear that indicated he should possess at least some skill, his playstyle was terrible and he far underperformed where I would have expected him. Access didn’t make him a better player, and now my Ignore List is one person longer.

To counterbalance this, another person I ran with was complimentary not of me but of my guild and the way we conduct ourselves within the game. I can’t explain why, but I felt rather pleased that my guild had a good reputation for producing skilled players willing to help out with others. Even though I was running the same levels of content as others, the social or skillful aspects of MMO playing shone through the raw statistics of play. That kind of emergent social gameplay is what we should reward, not simply time spent or a bad attitude.

Now for my first reply to this piece:

Damn you, Lane Haygood. My account will reactivate 1 September.

There is so much here to discuss, I do not know where to begin. I really wish we had Lane on the podcast this week (maybe he can make it?) as there are several things I’d like to talk about here!

Rather than carry on, I want to address a continuing and pervasive trend which is beginning to grate on my nerves. Trying to paint all discussion related to MMOs as ‘boring and tedious’ is no better than doing the same with all discussion related to sport, or RPGs, or beer.

There is legitimate, forward-looking work (like this piece) that does not get bogged down in minutae, and then there is the “Let me read my WoW chatlog to you” shit which is often found in other places. It’s fairly obvious that we do the former and not the latter here. I’d appreciate it if people would notice this, and respect the authors who expend great time and effort to write thoughtful and studied work on a popular, expanding, developing area of RPGs.

People who continually find themselves unable to tell the difference between thoughtful discourse and meaningless dribbling, and who are unable to give respect where it is due, may eventually find themselves unable to post. And that would be a shame. For them.

Personally, I really like your suggestion about solo-partying. Even though I’ve never played WoW, this guy’s always intrigued me:

http://www.geekologie.com/2008/10/guy_plays_36_world_of_warcraft.php

I’ve always thought I’d have a lot more fun playing a party or group of adventurers than a single character, much like a traditional RPG. Even if it would be impossible to solo the highest level content, I still really like the idea of setting up a system to control a dozen or so characters at once, especially if all fo the individual characters had more customization options than just their class and a few bells and whistles.

This was a nice read. :)
I liked your suggestion regarding skilling up rather than levelling up

But then we’ll have half the podcast filled with MMO. D:

get on the podcast and talk about this it would be alot better than having to read for a long time!

Wow … that’s a lot of writing …