Crowfall

Draegan_sl said:

Tuco what do you say to new mods as they attempt to engage peeps in the Amod thread? That might apply here.

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What? I tell them to follow your footsteps and make a mess of things so I can swoop in, act self-righteous and farm them +nets. I don't see how that's relevant here.

Okay, here's something I think would be interesting, challenging, a contribution to CF's development and engaging to the larger CF community. It's much more work than just sitting around with a bunch of nerds and jerking off to hopium, and it requires a lot more knowledge of the gamesphere. But now that the kickstarter is over you don't have shit to do with CF anyway since they have nothing useful to say until they start talking alpha 1 timing.

Write a series of articles, one for each game that CF primarily draws from.

For each article, describe:
0. The general MMO scene pre-formation (ex: EQ was largely inspired by MUDs. UO was largely inspired by ultima, MUDs. WoW was inspired by EQ etc).
1. What that game set out to accomplish in relation to PvP. As in, what kind of pvp hopium were the devs pushing in the pre-alpha stage.
2. How that game formed itself through the alpha->release period.
3. The kind of pre-release communities that existed. Both the general feeling of the small groups, who the big groups and the big players were, what the uninitiated players were planning to do etc.
4. How the release period (first month) went.
5. How the community fared in the first few months. Who were the big players, why were they successful etc. (maybe this is useless, I dunno).
6. What successes the game had.
7. What failures the game had.
8. What helped cause the downfall of the game from a PvP standpoint (ex: WoW's open world pvp was pretty much killed by the honor system and battlegrounds pushing away from sandbox pvp and toward spvp. SB was killed by bugs, duping and monopolization).
9. How that game changed as it progressed from infancy to adulthood to where it is now (retirement home for most games).
9. What CF's design does to avoid these failures and build on its successes.
10. What open questions there are about CF that doesn't address these failures (Will we see cf.exe errors?).
11. Finally, this only works well IMO if you can present the content of the article to CF devs in an interview and get their feedback on how CF won't make the same mistakes of previous games.

Doing this would require a lot of research, and would involve really finding out who knows these games in depth. Even though I was hardcore into GW2 and helped lead one of the most accomplished GW2 guilds that was one of the few guilds to win in the NA and EU scene I still don't know everything about WvW and GW2's history. It'd be great if you found the top people in each game and had sets of interviews done with those people. And fortunately many of them are all circle-jerking on CF now so it's pretty ripe. Getting a sense of the pre-alpha hopium might be hardest because the number of people active in the scene pre-release is small compared to post-release, and usually their memories are drowned in post-release events. I can't really remember why we were hyped up about AoC. I mostly just remember killing fools, building the first keep, being the first to detroy a keep etc after release.

Maybe it's only interesting to me because I pretty much play these games for the meta-level community type events and I'm interested in the success/failure of these games from an MMO design perspective. This information is really not stored anywhere on the internet and I've never seen this kind of analysis done publicly. Most sources of information you have are extremely biased (ex: from people like me) and sorting through it is hard.

the games I'd want to see this done on:
UO
DAoC
Shadowbane
SWG
AoC
Warhammer
DF
GW2
PoE

Vitality_sl said:

I like that idea Tuco. Thanks.

I think I'd adapt that concept into a CF Feature dissection and how it compares (bad/good) to previous games.

The concept is sound. The issue is CF hasn't really committed to very many feature details. So it's hard to compare without pumping hopium-if statements. Which I want to avoid.

They're backing off the Telegraph conversation for instance in a very save face manner.

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Basing it off CF ideas makes the articles built on ideas you don't really know the truth of and are subject to change though. There's real meat and truth in previous games and the people involved. Imagine doing a biopsy of the history of telegraphs in gaming. Up to you though, since you're doing the work!

haha wolverine + Assassin's Creed