Swyyw

I'd like to reiterate the point that yes, a lot of people in EVE are indeed "accidentally" roleplaying. I agree though that in a certain way, there is a synergy between the game and the meta game, the character's goals and one's RL motivation that you don't find in other games.

An obvious example is alliance wars. They are not dictated by the game, and can be started at the whim of an alliance leadership, to secure resources, or because of ideological differences, or any other reason.

I know that your point is that if there's no separation between the game and RL, then it's not role-playing. But let's look at it another way. How do you make the distinction between two EVE players from different power blocs arguing the merits their respective alliances (with varying degrees of civility), and 2 WoW players, one from the horde, one from the alliance, doing the same thing? In both case, everyone is in character. On one hand, their conflict emerged from the sandbox, on the other it was inspired by the lore, but in my opinion all of them are role-playing.

The other thing I want to talk about here (again about EVE online, sorry) is the Providence region. Until the moment it fell to outside forces last year, it was a region of nullsec space (the FFA PvP area) ruled by a "NRDS" (not red don't shoot) policy. In other words, every player was welcome to peacefully live there. Any pirate operating in the area was added to a black list, and hunted down if spotted nearby. Obviously, a large amount of neutral people thriving in the region was an economic boon to the alliance holding the place, their superior logistics chain allowing them to gain an edge on the market burgeoning there. Security was decent, ensured by gate camps at the region entry points, and an intelligence communication channel.

That is to say FFA PVP doesn't have to stay FFA if the players don't want it to. This happened in a completely free-form environment with no failsafe at all. It was a hassle to maintain the black list, but that could be adjusted with minor tweaks to the game.

You say PvP is accessory to the sandbox. But on the other hand, how can this Providence empire (and civilization in general) emerge if not around the idea of security?

It can be legitimate, and still be a scam (not a very elaborate one, I admit). Those are not contradictory, so I don't really understand your argument there. However, I agree that Scott was probably more angry at himself than at Zeeqo when he embarked on his crusade...

While I agree there's a lot of ridiculous stuff being said on the Internet (well, duh), I think it would be naive to think that these games are being developed with only fun in mind. Video games are a creative business but a business nonetheless, and sometimes fun will be sacrificed at the altar of money-making. I feel this is particularly prevalent with MMO's, where developers will stick to the "safe" game design choices to be sure to reach the widest audience possible.

I guess Everquest Next is just a project name for now, they'll probably change it to something more catchy later on.

A year or two after EQ2 was released, I remember reading an article from SOE's CEO (or some other executive) saying that they had made a mistake calling the game "Everquest 2". It didn't really aim at replacing EQ1 nor did was it really going for the same public. They probably will not call their game EQ3.

Exactly.

I realize that we sometimes tend to look at those first MMO experiences through rose-coloured glasses, and therefore I will not say that they were better games overall, but instead that they gave me very different expectations about what would be the future of the genre than what we actually ended up with.

When I started playing UO and EQ (and also a failure of a game called Mankind), I didn't think of MMO's as a genre, more as a technology.

Interestingly, from a chronological point of view, the direction the genre took goes hand in hand with the decline of the "immersive sim" (see the series of articles that they ran on the subject at rockpapershotgun). There was a place for the unexpected in those older games that we lost a little in the more directed and polished experiences we have now. I regret that in most games, the "massively" aspect has become mostly anecdotal.