Mike Rozak

The pay-per-hour doesn't address the fundamental problem of the blogger though...

Basically, he doesn't have 20 hours/week to play.

Consequence #1 is that he doesn't think he's getting his money's worth... so he recommends pay-per-hour.

Consequence #2, that he hasn't realized yet, is that he doesn't want to play a MMO with 500+ hours of content, because he'll never-ever get past hour 100.

Consequence #3 is that his chances of forming strong social ties with such short and sporatic gameplay are nil. Any game he plays will need ways to encourage people to meet, play for awhile, and then (probably) never meet again. A consequence of this is that the game needs to do its best to pair up compatible people right away, not leaving "meeting the right person" up to chance.

I can list more consequences, but to put it simply: If there are enough people that want to play MMOs, but only once in awhile, then MMOs will have to evolve into completely new beasts, or go extinct. (Personally, I think there are huge numbers of people wanting a more casual MMO.)

Are millions of WoW-derived worlds good? My opinion: http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/PersonalVirtualWorlds.htm

I'm working on an indie online game that heavily uses text-to-speech, http://www.CircumReality.com . (It's far from done yet, but there is a little bit of content.)

Some comments about TTS:

- It won't take Ceptral long before they provide UI so an infinite number of voice variations can be made.

- It's possible to record your own voice (around 1000 sentences) and make a TTS voice from it. However, (a) other players would have to download the voice (which is 4-40 MB depending on the quality), and (b) Cepstral hasn't made that functionality public yet.

- In the long run, TTS for chatting between two players is far inferior to voice chat, barring some exceptions. You can even apply voice transformation/disguise to your voice-chat voice and do gender conversions.

- TTS is most useful for NPCs and game narration.