Andycapyoass

@ conceptualclarity - actually, that's a misconception. The Dead Sea Scrolls (those that weren't sold off, burned for firewood, or just plain misplaced) contained two types of apocryphal text: New Testament writings, and Gnostic writings. What makes it a valuable find for the historians were the Gnostic writings, because that was a (insane) sect of Christianity which was entirely destroyed in the middle of the 3rd century.

The Old Testament, on the other hand, is a collection of most of the writings in the Torah, which in turn was the result of the Jewish codification of their religious laws back around the same time as the very first gospels were being written - so somewhere between AD 50 and AD 100. But this was basically a collecting of works. There's no easy way to know how long any of the given scriptures existed in written form. Some we can point to from references in the New testament, as well as those that reference each other, but that's about it. Even at the time of codification, some had yet to be written down at all.

In other words, don't believe everything you read.
ESPECIALLY if it claims to be the word of God ;)

Your comment about wanting an MMO that lacks (or deemphasizes?) combat reminded me of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_in_the_Desert

I *think* that game might be doing what you're talking about here. I've been looking into past and current attempts at creating single-server, dynamic world MMOs lately, and this one had jumped out at me as rather unique. You may want to look into it.

YES.
Community (and the MULTIPLAYER) aspects of MMOs are totally missing in 90 percent of them. It's why I despise and will never play WOW. I hate the idea of just playing some communal single player game, while the designer tells us to keep our hands and feet inside the cart at all times, and Instance X goes off every day at 2pm so don't be late. Lame.

I have yet to come across a MMO that focuses on the community: where city and nation building is done by players, with players. The factions aren't predetermined, but dynamic, ever-changing alliances between player groups. Where the peace-time element is just as important as the war-time element (ie: crafting is actually INTERESTING, and only players control shops, the market, and the in-game economy via a single-server-type supply/demand effect a la EVE). I don't give a crap about what some group of designers has *chosen* to have happen next in the game, like a carnival ride, where all the players are waiting in line and not talking to each other. I want the storyline to be what's actually happening, right then, between players and alliances.

My dream MMO, in prose form: I am a merchant. I sell armor, and I specialize in really awesome helmets. Lots of people around the area sell armor and you can get helmets from any of them, but mine are the best. Even if sometimes I end up crafting a low-level helmet, I always make sure it at least looks cool. My shop is located in a city called "Awesometude", founded (and named) by Awesome_Man three months ago, along with four of his friends, who help run the place and level the town itself. We just had a city-wide meeting last week about adding two more catapults to the south face, and expanding the northern walls. I thought this was a waste of my tax money, but it went through anyway. Regardless, I like it here, because outside the city walls, shops like mine are troubled: there are a lot of solo player-killers roaming nearby who like razing player-created buildings like the one I sell from. But inside the city's Safe Zone (which was plotted out by A_Man), PVP is impossible as long as war hasn't been declared. The walls and defenses help too, as to the enchantments granted by the recently-built temple (although it's aligned to a god some of our Paladins don't worship [meaning they have a debuff if they fight with us], which pissed them off and made them leave...eh, ya win some ya lose some)

Awesome_Man is a really good leader actually, and incredibly ambitious. We've been expanding pretty quickly (he controlled a city before, but it was destroyed by Doomhandle Inc, who are an allied group of large cities trying to build an empire far to the south), and yesterday we made the decision to pull the player-created trade portal that links us with the city of Noobtopia, several leagues from here. This is the first step in declaring war, since you can't do so against cities you are linked to in this way. Today, A_Man's friend and fellow ruler sent Noobtopia the official bad news. They have three days to respond, either accepting our War Challenge or surrendering. If they don't respond, they automatically accept and we go to war. If they surrender (or we win), they lose their Keep, their rulers lose their privileges, and we'll finally be identified as a "small kingdom" on the official Map.

I will be on the front lines, commanding an infantry of about eighty to a hundred players, depending on how many casual players show up that day. Our stable master, DangerNick, will command our mounted garrison of about thirty-five. We also have sixteen fliers. And of course Awesome_Man and his friends, whose special alliance-wide Morale buff will affect all of us so long as they survive (of course..it's a debuff for them, because this game is not a mindless horse-race of ever increasing power, but a balancing act of cause and effect: which makes perfect sense in a community-based world where not everyone gets to single-handedly save the day all the time).

Word is that Noobtopia's players are trying to buy the help of R@d Horse, the town between us who focus entirely on selling mounts to adventurers. A_Man anticipated this and has promised to match whatever they're paying, and throw in a permanent minimum-tax alliance to boot. We think they're going for it, but it's hard to say with those guys.

Of course...win or lose, I'll still be making awesome helmets at the end of the day. Empires my rise, Empires my fall, but nobody can take that away from me.

Then again, when they release the semiannual Historical Accounts in a few months, it would be pretty sweet if our success on the field turned was notable enough to be put in the history books. If so, the kingdom of Awesometude would be forever immortalized in the Lore of the World...
[/end dreaming]

*sigh*

"He's making the classic mistake too many MMO devs make, assuming that his job is to tell a linear story instead of recognizing that his job is to create a coherent and internally consistent story world in which players can tell their own stories."

Did you even read the article? He's making the exact opposite assumption here. He's saying that because current MMOs are shattered into millions of little easily-digestible pieces to keep server loads down (which, on the whole, would still be a massive tech hurdle for your average company to get around), that that's *forcing* MMOs to be linear-esque anyway, which is true. Aside from EVE, which is unsharded by the way, I've never seen an MMO utilize player-manipulated political landscapes, and DEFINITELY never seen player-manipulated physical landscapes, be they the result of city building/razing or destroying mountain ranges.

And the reason for this is pretty basic, and I really don't understand why people here are having such a hard time grasping it when he laid it out pretty clearly in the first place. First of all, get it out of your head that this idea can simply be executed on a multi-server system arbitrarily, and the dev team just has to make twice + as much content. That is not how servers work. They do not store all the games data, or any of your data or any such ridiculousness. They just store *instances* of all those things, which exist as dormant entities somewhere else. You're in fact playing an illusion of an illusion. There's no built in mother brain that can say "oh, on this server, mountain A was destroyed". No, they just pop in what needs to be popped in, with no memory of that time 80 players pooled their magic and caused an earthquake. Even if such a thing could be memorized, it wouldn't even know which server that happened on. You can ONLY pull off that kind of bullshit if you have a single server. Not because of the server, but because of the game.

Nothing personal to you in particular, Myria, but the only thing terminally flawed here is everyone's assumptions of how MMOs work. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that playing them tends to preclude understanding them.

@ Justin – haha! That happened to me recently on a flight. I saw the drink cart heading my way and I started thinking, "Mmmm, I'd really like a Coke right about now." The cart gets closer and I'm all, "Oh yeah, that Coke's gonna be delicious."

Then the attendant's actually there and she asks me what I want, and I say, "Um, uh, um...applejuice."

DOH!