cheers, Mopy.

Indeed, guilds (seems to be the going term right now) should be more than a chat room and a tag after your name. However, the problem I see with your idea is that it would lead to massive, half-the-players-on-the-server zerg guilds, reducing them to just another set of buffs. There should be advantages to small guilds at least (perhaps the smaller group of economists is more agile than the fatty hundred-man bureaucracy?)

What guilds should do is open up opportunities – guild quests perhaps? A tie in to that persistent, player affected world people are going on about at great length – while a single player is almost never going to be able to affect the world, a guild should be able to actually /do something/

This is one of the things I really like about EVE – it’s the only game where there’s a /great war/ involving thousands of players split along alliance lines. You have massive battles and a massive level of cooperation between players because everything takes so much effort.

The only downside is that while this great war is wonderful and all, the only product of it is a few dots changing color, and a new topic to smack on the forums.
But if the game provided some more concrete evidence of a victory, now that’s a good incentive to guild up and work together.

Frankly I believe SWG to be the best example of how to create a robust and useful crafting system.

There are some key elements for crafting to be useful:

1. It is okay to have excellent drops, however gear should not have an “epic” flavour to it – instead it should be customizeable when it drops, requiring “epic” mats to customize and enhance the item to a players liking. This not only allows crafting a viable role in drops but also provides the player with more options.

2. There needs to be a decay system in place, preferably one thats not too severe and also allows for the ability to “renew” the item – this should cost 1/2 mats to build and require a crafter of sufficient skill (can pro-rate according to abiltiy).

3. Lootable corpses can provide an excellent means of balancing the economy. The downside here is in how it affects character evolution, as this system tends towards plain/non-epic gear. This is more for a hardcore pvp centric game and not (without some adjustment) amicable to the casual gamer.

4. Dynamic components is an important idea, the idea that you can create a “handle” which can be used in a number of recipes. This creates a low/mid skilled market so that its not just the “master” crafters actually making money in a practical sense.

5. Supply contracts are an excellent idea, they can also serve as player created quests. Don’t want to farm the mats yourself? No problem, post what you’ll pay and what you want, if its reasonable someone can fulfill the contract and both sides win.

Regarding passwords and thumbprints, yeah it’s all 1’s and 0’s in the end. If you can steal one, you can steal the other. I suppose a possible solution would be to start encrypting both. I imagine even a simple 128-bit key (which is about the standard, or below the standard nowadays as I understand it) would be more trouble than the farmers would like to put up with.

That’s probably a good middle point between passwords in the wild and biometrics: encrypted passwords. It won’t solve the the problem of them being stolen, but at least most farmers couldn’t use them. I doubt they’re gonna set up to crunch and crack the encryption on the passwords they collect. Although you never know.

Would biometrics really be more secure though? I feel like it’s just a password in digital form that you can’t change. Sure, it’s more complicated to steal and spoof than a conventional password, but once you’ve got the data for someone’s thumb-print, well, they’re pretty much SOL, right? You can’t get a new pattern burned on. That’s why I’m skeptical of widespread use of biometrics.

Hi, by the way! I found by way here by following your comment on Kill Ten Rats. You’re on my blog roll now.

And yet, I can’t help but to point at it. WoW has a hojillion players. Either that hojillion players don’t care about level gaps, or that hojillion players can put up with it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have a hojillion players. This is not an appeal to authority, but just an observation. Which is valid, I think. You can replace ‘WoW’ with any other successful MMO that creates progress gaps, really.

I think that, at least conceptually, I can agree with you when you say that MMOs shouldn’t always be about that type of linear, granular advancement. However, all of them seem to be (save rare exceptions liks UO as you pointed out). If 90%, or some other godawful amount, of all MMOs ever created do have this clearly defined, strict and almost dogmatic type of granular advancement, it is the standard whether we like it or not. And by the way, I don’t mean that standard = good. Just saying it is. It is because it’s clear, easily understandable and addresses the problem of constantly increasing challenge to the player quite nicely.

On the downside, yeah, it creates this type of common progress gaps. Are progress gaps a problem? Maybe. But if they are, it isn’t as huge as some people can make it to be. I really don’t mean to sound like a grade-A smacktard when I say this, but if some people cancel because they can’t play with their friends (a very valid reason), that’s more of a people’s problem than a game’s problem. It’s not that the game is forbidding you, completely, to play with your friends at the speed of the fastest leveler. It gives you a way. If you can’t, or won’t take it, I don’t think that’s the game’s problem, really.

It’s a personal choice, to cancel in those terms, and should be absolutely respected. But to blame the game for not being designed to wrap around our busy RL schedules with utmost precision, well I think that might be a bit disingenuous.