Brillig

Threads like these pretty clearly illustrate why lottery winners so often end up in financial trouble down the road...

No, Paragon Studios failed to

"Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math." ~Ambrose Bierce


Sounds perfect for #SaveCoH. :P

User error.

If it were that great, that successful and that profitable, it wouldn't have been shut down.

Some thoughts on some crazy ideas I'd like to see MM (or any MMO designer) take on:


1. Self balancing abilities. Rather than have the designers dictate balance, let the players tell you what's working and what isn't. In other words - the more an ability gets used, the less powerful it gets. And the less an ability gets used, the more powerful it gets. There should be caps on either end to prevent things from getting too out of whack, but if something hits the cap, that's a good indication that the designers need to take a better look at it.

You can do the same thing with mobs too. If everyone is beating on snarks instead of boojums, the snarks gradually become harder, worth less xp, have less loot. Etc...

While this could be vulnerable to metagaming, I think that over the scale of a large MMO, it wouldn't be possible to make a coordinated effort to muck with things.


2. Getting away from the 'trinity'. People say this a lot, but it's harder than it sounds. The problem is that MMO combat revolves around reducing mob numeric counter A before player numeric counter B. So there are basic roles based around: reducing A faster, keeping B from being reduced, raising B, etc... I think that fundamentally, getting away from the trinity will require a whole new concept of what 'winning' looks like in an MMO. What about an MMO where using the environment to defeat mobs (knocking them off ledges, into pits, into water, dropping walls on them, etc...) was as valid a means of defeating them as combat. Some of that exists in current MMOs, but it's really a sideshow, a trick that you use occasionally, but not a core mechanic.


3. PvP that's a game, not a war or a sport. One of the problems with PvP is that people have different expectations of what PvP is. The most common implementation is PvP as war. There's no expectations of fairness other than what the designer considers 'balanced'. You get higher level, you get stronger; you get better gear, you get stronger - and most of the time you can get both of those through PvP. This creates what, to me, is a silly situation where after a while there's a barrier to entry. New PvPers are told they have to pay their dues and suffer through getting whomped in order to catch up. Who wants to suffer in a game.

PvP as sport has seen some implementations as well, where the playing ground is level, and the main (only?) determinant is player skill. This is less common in MMOs, and more common in stand alone games, FPS' etc...

PvP as game pretty much only happens outside of computer games. In many games, there's a formal or informal handicapping system so that the less skilled player still has a decent chance of winning. In Go you get extra stones. In chess, your opponent may take a piece or two off the board. In Monopoly, you might start with extra cash. The point is to create an environment where two players can each have a challenge even in the face of disparate ability levels. To my knowledge, no one has ever done this in an MMO. I'm sure PvP players would consider it suicidal for a game designer to try it. I think someone should give it a go, though.

If I had to pick just one thing, I'd pick PvP. Adding PvP after the fact is a really tough needle to thread, and when you try to do it in a game that allows players to be gloriously imbalanced.... it's going to be a disaster.

And as others have pointed out, this decision bled over in to a lot of other bad designs and issues.