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You know, I was just surfing around and I happened to stumble across an interview with Craig Morrison, the Executive Producer and Game Director for Age of Conan on mmogamer.com. He has some interesting things to say about game design, that I thought I would share. He said:
"Players main disposition is to break things...I prefer to ask the designers to embrace the thought of putting their minds into the minds of a player, rather than seeing it as a challenge almost like, We must police them, we must force them to play the way that we want them to play!...I think it presumes the designer is smarter than the player...they might not play it in the way we want them to play it, or that we thought they would play it. They might look at it totally differently and I think that good designers can look at it and go, Ok, theyve reacted differently. They are not doing what I thought theyd do. Why? I think the predisposition in the industry has generally been to go, Ill stop them from doing that! Im going to draw a line here and, no they wont! Ill do everything in my power to roadblock them! And someone will find a way to do it anyway!...What I prefer to do is to ask my designers to go, WHY are they doing that? What at the fundamental level are they trying to achieve that you didnt want them to achieve?
The entire interview can be found at
http://www.mmogamer.com/05/15/2009/w...os-just-be-fun
It really made me think about game design in ways I had not before. And, to MrDead, who said "People leave all the time. A few forumites isn't even a stastic." Yes you are right, but it is the quality lost, not the quantity, that people will miss. I'm sure Justice will recover in time of course, but in the short-term, there will be some loss. Hami raids, if there even are any in the near future, will be a much rougher experience. They may wonder why people do task forces when all the ones they have ever done have been 4 hour affairs for little reward. Perhaps, never knowing anything better, they may not notice the loss, and of course, in time, things will return to normal, we were all noobs once, but if you think this will have zero impact on the Justice community, of which you are obviously not interested in being a part of, you are wrong.