Earthrise developers seeking player input

by James Egan Oct 1st 2009 at 5:00PM

Filed under: Sci-fi, Game mechanics, MMO industry, New titles, Earthrise

Players having more input or control over the games they play is an interesting direction some MMO companies are taking. While not every company will establish something structured as EVE Online has with the Council of Stellar Management or (as Massively reader Se7en pointed out yesterday) Star Wars Galaxies has with its Galactic Senate, the simple fact that game developers are making efforts to allow more player input is encouraging. Masthead Studios is a newcomer to the MMO scene with Earthrise, a far future post-apocalyptic title, but already they're showing an interest in getting player feedback as they develop the game. The devs at Masthead will now have a "Community Consensus" on the Earthrise forums which brings up key issues with the game's design, to learn how players feel about these aspects of the title.

It's not clear yet exactly how much input the players will really have on Earthrise but if the devs are willing to listen to the playerbase, we'd say this is a step in the right direction. The first Community Consensus deals with an issue that will likely be hotly debated -- adding additional incentive for player killing, with greater benefits at higher levels of notoriety.

Earthrise Community Manager Moll writes:

"By design, any Criminal (player killers which kill without reason and with no thought about your war faction) will gain Criminal Karma which will make them more and more fearsome. Behind the scenes, the designers and developers wondered what our community thought about the possibility to give criminals some additional incentive for being so fearless. One of these incentives includes the potential that criminals may be able to negate the Insurance of their victims. In this case, each player killer (PK) may have a small chance based on his Criminal Karma to negate insurance of a random item and make it fall after the kill of his victim."

What's your view on providing more tangible benefits to being an outlaw? Should more games do this or is boosting crime a recipe for griefer disaster?

Tags: community, community-consensus, community-manager, criminal, criminal-karma, earthrise, game-mechanics, insurance, masthead-studios, moll, new-titles, notoriety, outlaw, pk, player-killer, post-apocalyptic, sci-fi

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Graill said on 7:33PM 10-01-2009

Glad after over ten years this starts happening enought to make it newsworthy and put on an MMO site " Players having more input or control over the games they play is an interesting direction some MMO companies are taking" *shakes head*. Really?!

As for the MMO industry turning upside down in amazement over the creation of EVE's council, lets be direct on why it was created in the first place, and that was to stop the hordes of folks leaving EVE due to the STILL present corruption in that game on the dev and player sides. The structured council has done exactly what since it was created?

MMO companies just now figuring out consequence is good for creating subs and retaining players is comical. Must it take failure after failure and tens of thousands of lost jobs before folks with hard heads listen?

vine said on 11:35PM 10-01-2009

So Earthrise will basically promote ganking... not a very attractive prospect for someone who isn't overly interested in PvP. Perhaps a Fearsome stat, which gives you a greater chance to be missed against players.

Harabeck said on 4:58PM 10-10-2009

It's only a proposed mechanic they are interested in seeing discussed. It's by no means final.

Dblade said on 11:51PM 10-01-2009

Problem though is that you can already just use forums, email and website forms, or other means of feedback instead of a council to ensure the same thing with a greater sample. EVE likes the whole council/live event thing, but it always seemed to me to be wasting money.

The criminal idea: hmmm. It would be ok if there were some restrictions in place to prevent players from PKing a single person over and over in the hopes of forcing a drop. I'd even prefer one guaranteed drop from a character in a 72 hour period than this.

Also, a minor nitpick: could you also link to the original post instead of just linking Moll's name to Massively's tag of him? I'd like to read the whole thing in context.