Maybe, but your PvP (breaking the rules, anything goes) is pathetic. You are essentially saying that anything is acceptable to win a game, even going outside the game to do so. Under your ideology, paying off the game GMs for favors or benefit is acceptable. Under your general ideology, finding out the location of a player in RL and showing up with a gang to beat them is acceptable. Anything is acceptable by your standards.
That's a strange conclusion to draw, considering that it explicitly contradicts tenets which I have stated multiple times, and certainly has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion at hand. I have never considered it acceptable to cross real-life with the Internet for any reason, whether or not it is a game. As I have stated multiple times, what happens on the Internet STAYS on the Internet. If we start taking our Internet disputes into real life, that way lies the extermination of entire families and people being skinned and turned into coats. I believe I've made my position QUITE clear on the entire skinning and coating thing.
Besides, what I consider "right" has never been the topic of discussion. I discuss what *IS*. Whether or not this is right or not is wholly irrelevant. We are discussing design. If the system can be undermined simply by someone doing the "wrong" thing, this is a flaw in the design. I remind you that the, as demonstrated in EVE, MMO players are raging psychopaths devoid of any sense of honor.
As for "I was talking to someone else", seriously? Of all the butting in to conversations to bitch and moan about a game not having PvP when it was specifically stated not to have PvP and you are upset I commented here?
I did not "moan" about it. I discussed the ramifications of design as it pertained to how the presence or lack of PvP influenced the topic.
You, on the other hand, apparently wrote a post that served no other purpose except to fling unprovoked insults. What was that even supposed to be about? You can't just fling insults out of the air, you have to indicate what exactly I said in the thread which you think is stupid and THEN insult me. Sheesh. You complain about my views on what is or isn't acceptable, yet you have no sense of propriety at all.
I think game developers would be well served by studying real life systems and applying the lessons there to game design. Real life empires don't last forever because after a while, no matter how strong the empire, things like corruption, in-fighting and decadence set in and make it weak and allow other "hungrier" people to defeat it.
I don't think you can FORCE players to engage in corruption, in-fighting, or decadence. Besides, my personal experience with running empires in MMOesques is that you don't need to. Being tiresome, whiny people, they manage this on their own just fine. Empires in MMOs *DO* break up from corruption, in-fighting, and decadance. Drama breaks out, popcorn is served, and sometimes people just become fat and lazy and stop trying, and sometimes this costs them the crown.
If done right, these "natural" mechanics would prevent sandbox MMO stagnation in a much better way than just wiping the world after a while, which I don't like at all.
Well, the truth of MMOs is not so much that "stagnation" sets in. Very few cases actually are truly stagnant. It's not so much stagnation that occurs so much as lockout that occurs. The Old Boys' Club tends to have a uniform interest in excluding the upstarts, even as they fight amongst themselves.
A big part of MMOs' appeal is the persistence aspect, and constantly resetting them really messes with that stuff.
Indeed, there are lots of episodic games of this nature, but I tend to be turned off from them because building the Eternal Empire is part of the appeal.
For example, what if an MMO forced guilds to assign positions and ranks to every member which determined their status, power and economic position within the guild's region of control? Then you have your classes and reasons for conflict, scheming and power grabs. Obviously there are a lot of details that have to be worked out, but I don't see any theoretical obstacles to this sort of thing.
Would never work. You can't *FORCE* a guild to treat members in any particular way, nor can you force-map some arbitrary in-game position to the actual internal political system. For instance, I've run guilds in games where I was not even an actual player. The actual game itself had little to no real appeal to me, I was purely a metagame player, didn't even have a character. I was without a doubt, the most powerful and influential member of the guild, the one who founded and operated the entire thing and without me, the entire effort would have basically come apart at the seams. I held it all together with my control network. But you wouldn't be able to assign me a "position" or a "rank" within the formal in-game guild, because at the level I was playing from, even the individual "guild" within the game was simply a tool, a means to an end. I controlled many "guilds". My rival "guildmaster" was a similar figure, he was an ex-player as well. Our struggles caused madness and consternation. And yet were outside the system. What did that make us? Gods? Devils? It certainly seemed that way. We wielded powers as destructive as the developers themselves, pitting them against each other in struggles that would destroy entire guilds.
Real life empires fell because of the failings of short lived humans as well as ethnic and political drama. These don't exist among games mainly played by a homogenous group of western middle class white men whose lifespan vastly outranges the likely span of a commercial MMO.
Wouldn't say that. While their physical lifespans might, their attention spans don't. Generation ADHD suffers from cripplingly short attention spans. I've known so many rivals whose empires ultimately fell not because I was able to destroy them in their prime, but simply because their leaders...lost interest, distracted by the constant barrage of shiny things presented to them outside the game. They were replaced by second-stringers who were simply not as capable, and thus ultimately fell, not because I was specifically able to overcome them, but simply because their leader had, effectively, died, and been replaced by his less than competent "son". If anything, these time-kills represent the bulk of my guild destructions. I'm pretty sure I've destroyed more guilds as a result of their own succession processes or lack thereof failing them after the "death" of their leader than through actual victory in conflicts, because I, unlike them, never quit while I'm winning. Winners never quit!
In all the games I've ever played I've never seen a working example of what you describe, and I have played literally dozens of text based MMOs. Most games may last a few years but eventually someone takes over and NEVER loses.
Truth. It's always someone outside of Generation ADHD, too. I've been that guy. Hell, some of those games still technically exist...where I rule alone, Emperor of the Bones. At least it makes maintaining my winning state easy when no one exists to oppose me anymore. There are a LOT of still-existing games out there where pretty much everyone has long since given up, where that one guy rules alone over the ashen landscape of his making. Often he doesn't even play anymore, but simply nobody exists to challenge his dominion and the developers for some reason can't be bothered to shut the game down, either, perhaps because they forgot it exists.
All such things snowball. Weren't you the one who made a thread about that? It's simply easier to perpetuate a situation where you keep winning than to change the situation from one where you're losing to one where you're winning. By the time you're winning, the hardest is over. To keep winning, all you have to do is not get bored and quit.