been made for a game
"Small Worlds" is the name wow power level of the presentation given by the great game designer Raph Koster. Koster was the lead designer of Ultima Online, creative director for Star Wars Galaxies and also did some work for Sony Online. His presentation defined many already well-implemented practices of MMORPGs , and the logic behind these practices is quite revealing... and well, sad.
A large portions of this presentation focuses on the notion that player skill-based MMOs are bad business sense, because not everyone is equal. Koster cites something called the Pareto principle, which states that 20% of the people consolidate 80% of the power in any group. That means that the 1/5 of the community in a skill-based game will be vastly more skilled and powerful than the other wow powerleveling remaining players. Also, competition is apparently a bad thing for e-social lives-- if players recognize that certain other players achieve more in a ladder system, it supposedly disrupts the balance of the social network.
What we have here, is a very prominent figure in the industry espousing a view, to other industry representatives, that if you don't cater to the plebeians, you can't expect to be successful. It's kind of like the McDonald's strategy applied to online gaming. They serve cheap crappy food, but anyone can afford it and you probably don't even need to wear a shirt to get into the restaurant. Maybe the service and the quality of the meal sucks, but it's familiar and you know you'll get the same crappy service all across the board. Billions get served.
Auto Assault should have been made for a 40,000 peak target audience, with a budget to match. There's profit in that model, if you have the stones to pursue it, but everyone wants to swing for the fences. I think that if the people at the very top of the funding ladder had not tried to force it to be AION kinahsomething it was not, we might have made a cult classic with massive expansion and sequel appeal.
So how do these games become more accessible to the drooling masses? Easy! Just implement grinding, level treadmills, restrict any and all competition whatsoever. These systems are intentionally in place to prevent anyone from over-achieving or failing. I recently saw a WoW ad that said "Come join 8 million heroes!" Suddenly every single player is automatically a hero? Essentially, most MMOs are designed so anyone can hop on a game, gain levels and pay $15 US per month for their instant hero status.
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http://vriffan.6mablog.com/post/2010/04/16/what-a-MMORPG-really-game
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