On Thu, 2 Mar 2000, Robert "Dreadnok" Venters wrote:
>
> it seems as if you can't even trust your best friends nowadays , greed over
> items , and the e-bay crap are ruining some ppl's gaming experience ,
>
> right now on Rallos , ppl make real world profit from their looted items
> when pk'ing ,
This is somewhat philosophical and IMHO, but anyways:
These things happen, and these things hurt because online
RPGing is more than "just a game." The genre is evolving into
something I don't think most people are foreseeing - a virtual
world where your persona is not just a role you play, but an
alternate ego that is every bit as real as your real life.
Right now, the companies running these things have figured
this out to the extent that people will pay more for this than
a normal game. Would you pay $10/mo for a license to play D&D
or Traveller? Would you pay $1000 to a GM in one of these
games if he'd let you have a Super-Weapon-of-Critter-Slaying?
But people are willing to pay more for EQ and UO because
they're more than a game - they're your opportunity to run an
alternate personality in another world.
Unfortunately, none of the companies have really addressed the
full implications of this. You're not playing a game; you're
running around in a virtual world. To prevent it from
dissolving into the anarchy where every guttersnipe can get
away with whatever he wants to do, you need a social support
structure - laws, some form of government (a dictatorship by
the GMs would be sufficient for now). Based on some
pre-release comments by Verant on how they'd deal with
cheaters, I'd hoped that they'd seen the light. But
unfortunately they only seem interested in punishing violation
of programming code laws (hacking, bug exploiting), not social
laws. Oh well, maybe the next game...
To be fair to the people who do these types of things like
steal items or PK, they may still see it as "just a game."
The problem is that the people playing the same game have
different expectations of the seriousness with which other
people consider their actions. I see this genre splitting
into more serious virtual worlds and more laid-back "just a
game" type environments. Sort of like the schism that's
growing between the current crop of perpetual online RPGs and
multiplayer shoot-em-ups.
--
John H. Kim
kim@...