Matt Adcock

"I, for one, cannot wait for the stories to play out."

Some of us have been saying that for years...

Another noteworthy MUD is Avalon (http://avalon-rpg.com) which dates from 1989 and is still commercially successful to this day.

One of the original creators was Daniel James of Puzzle Pirates fame and Matt Mihaly of IRE/Sparkplay Media was a staffer there at one point too.

Last I heard Simutronics were still making 7 figures a year in subscriptions from text games, so I don't think WoW has put an end to subscriptions just yet.

I read it as him basically saying that WoW has killed the subscription market for games like WoW. Well yeah.

Tacking a cash shop onto an existing game is one thing, but as F2P becomes the norm we're going to see more and more games designed from the ground up to support this model.

This means developers and publishers using ever more sophisticated metrics to measure exactly who is spending, how much, and on what. The game design will then be tweaked accordingly to maximise the revenues.

It was bad enough when developers were criticised for using negative and positive reinforcement to keep people playing their games. Now these techniques will be employed to milk you for as much cash as possible in the shortest time.

Paiz may talk about "Quality gameplay and engagement" but ultimately a successful F2P game is just a fancy looking slot machine.

There are typically 3 factors which govern success in a PvP encounter in any MMORPG; player skill, character build and gear. The proportions of each vary from game to game but player skill is rarely the most significant factor. Many players like to believe that their victories are due to their superior skill, but once you've reached a basic level of competency it's mostly all about character build and gear. If a game system is weighted too heavily in favour of player skill it risks excluding those players who aren't highly skilled which is likely the majority of the customer base.

If you do want to reward player skill then ironically one of the best ways is to give them abilities that are highly situational, such as Crowd Control. This allows the more skilled players to shine because they can best judge when to use CC most effectively.

The author doesn't give any opinion on how he would change CC in WAR, but the obvious solution would be to extend cooldowns and immunities. The less frequently CC can be used then the more skill it takes to judge when best to use it in any given encounter.

ROM is a rather poor example to use, given that it is derived from DIKU. It's common when talking about DIKU muds to include the many DIKU derivatives such as ROM, Circle, SMAUG etc., as distinct from other codebase families such as LP, MUSH or MOO.

The main thrust of the article is a bit of a straw man as the new features he describes "class-less characters, city building, level-less progression" can all be found in MUDs, some of which pre date DIKU. Even the idea of a FPS MMO is not new; the MUD Avalon (from 1988) has a distinctly 'twitch' like combat system that rewards player skill over other factors.

DIKU was significant because it allowed people to set up their own game right out of the box. Other freely available codebases at the time such as Tiny or LP were more flexible, but required more work to produce a game. It was this ease of use, combined with a familiar D&D style game that made DIKUs the most popular MUDs.

Just a small correction, despite bearing his name the "Bartle Test" was not written by Richard Bartle. It was actually created by Erwin Andreasen and Brandon Downey.