Massively^™

I continued to hack and slash the isometric sprites until I noticed they were starting hit a lot harder. Thinking it was time to repair I checked my inventory and was greeted with the sight of a naked me! Unlike its MMO cousin, the first Diablo actually destroyed armor when its durability reached zero. I felt somewhat sheepish about it, but then I had a funny thought. Could you imagine if World of Warcraft followed the same design? Raiding would take a lot longer as people constantly left to repair after every two or three deaths. Tanks would be even rarer since they would have a much higher chance of losing items. The problems with that scenario quickly mount up and it's easy to see why Blizzard changed the durability system slightly when putting it into MMO form. That's not to say you will never find item decay in a MMO, especially if you explore some of the less mainstream games.

Specie (n) - any type of coined money, usually of metal. Also used to describe commodity metals.

The crafting systems of MMOs have taken their queues from many different sources to find minerals for mining professions. The usual, generally lower-level, metals such as copper, tin, or iron, are seemingly universal. But as you level you may run across some rather odd materials that are difficult or impossible to find in real life.

Today we will be looking at where the metals seen in games came from. Common or rare. Real or created for the sole purpose of sounding like it could be, these are the metals of our games.

Player versus Player combat is always a tricky subject in the realm of MMO design. It has been with us since some of the earliest games in the genre and has had a huge influence on many players. Indeed the demand for PvP game play is now so high, that most developers believe they have to include some form of it or risk losing players. It is easy to see why the developers for Age of Conan chose to have so many different types of PvP in their game. Unfortunately, just rubber-stamping PvP into a game can be bad idea especially, if you do not evaluate its overall impact on your player base.

Age of Conan uses a factionless system which makes it very vulnerable to negative forms of PvP like ganking and rez point camping. Some people think that's all there is to PvP in a MMO but there is much more behind the story. Many gamers prefer matching wits against real opponents instead of predictable AI enemies. If you go by the Bartle test then these players can be classified as "killers" though the term has a lot of negative connotations. Not everyone who is a PvP enthusiast is also a griefer out to ruin everyone's fun. This is why Funcom is trying to design a system that allows for player competition, but prevents an overabundance of asshattery.

Chances are good that if you read Massively, you either currently play or have played multiple MMOGs in your life. Whatever your reasons are, you're one of those players for whom "MMO" is a genre instead of a game. Not all players are like this. A lot of players get their start somewhere and then stick to that game for years, denouncing all other games as being incapable of being better than their chosen virtual playground. I used to be like that with EverQuest (can you tell?). For four years I played it pretty much exclusively, not even trying other games. But eventually, I got bored.

Thus started my lengthy and storied history of game-hopping. Traveling from world to world like some sort of virtual nomad, fueled by my love of the online massively multiplayer game, I sampled much of what the genre had to offer. While I eventually found a new home and anchor in World of Warcraft, it only served as a nice place to return to every few months. I still ventured out into each new and exciting world that various companies served up to me. They all had things I liked and didn't like about them, and I honestly have yet to play a game that I couldn't find something good to say about. Every online game has its own cool quirks that are pretty neat from a design standpoint. This is why it's tough to identify an objectively "best" game -- they're all so different! I thought today I'd talk a little bit about what I've played over the years and how I ended up with the many and varied opinions on the MMOG genre that I have.