--- cruise <cruise@casual-tempest.net> wrote:
> Since everyone's run out of things to say, I figured I might as well
> start another argument :P
I'm sure wars have been started over less ;)
<lots of snippage>
> Players do not know what will be fun. That's why game-design is hard.
> A good game designer /does/ know better than the players what they
> will enjoy - if he didn't he wouldn't be a good game designer.
Players seem to know what will be fun -for the immediate short term-.
Players (and sometimes administrators) might think up something cool
that works at the time, but detracts from the game experience further
down the line.
An example that I've experienced: Take a fairly narrow themed world
(Star Wars or WoW). It's the end of October in real life, what are
people are thinking about? Halloween. And... y'know what would be
really cool? If we could have pumpkins in the game. Yeah! And... ghost
costumes and stuff. Lets make some of those! And we can have witches
hats (for the female spellcaster types), broomstick and cobweb objects
that we can put up in houses and stuff. Yeah. How cool is THIS?
Probably quite cool for a few days. But after that you might be left
wondering "did that really contribute to my game world and the
background we spend months writing?". Does "seling out" pay out?
Perhaps player activity went up for a couple of weeks. Your bandwidth
clogged a little. Maybe a reviewer turned up looking for a decent
roleplay server and turned around straight away when he saw the plastic
ghoul costmes for sale in the Jedi headquarters.
On the other hand, maybe it did help your game. Perhaps you got a few
more subscriptions during halloween. Maybe players wiling to pay for
custom content spent some money. Maybe "selling out" really paid out as
well.
> The important caveat, of course, is that players hate to feel like
> their choices are being deliberately limited - the old "invisible
> wall" at the edge of a game area, for example, when a chasm would
> achieve the same effect but not feel forced. I suspect this is what
> most people object to - not the removal of choices, but the
> obviousness with which they are removed (such as a "nerf" in MMOG's -
> having the previous performance to compare to, any such limitation
> will be obvious).
I know players who have spent days trying to cross that magical barrier
or deep chasm (and, having given up and moved on, still come back to
look at it and think). They wonder if it's part of the game (and if it
isn't the roleplayers will still pretend it is). Which isn't such a bad
thing, actually. If your players have an interest in something, feed
it! Maybe that blank magical barrier will come down one day, or maybe
someone will "discover" a way to climb down the chasm some time in the
future.
C.
--
Christopher Lloyd
Email: crl199@alumni.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 7718 542837