posted on Saturday, June 11, 2005 5:14 PM
by
admin
God bless the free market...
So SOE are providing content for the soloist and "couple-ist" gamers. They'll say that it lets people drop in and play with less time available, but of course what it really does is remove the need to group with the sort of morons you inevitably find sprinting out of your camp mid-recuperation to accidentally train Krayt Dragons onto your ass.
Now SOE (mainly, I understand, thanks to the Talented Mr Koster, who I actually do admire despite his urge to experiment with me) are the high priests of forced grouping. Grouping, they say, builds intra-personal relationships. Intra-personal relationships make you keep paying SOE money. Except that those bonds tend to be with people so immature that if you spoke to them in any other online forum you'd be suspected of grooming them.
Now the vision is gone. Soloing is the new grouping. My wife and I can try EQ2 (and might do so) without the knowledge that we'll have to deal with the great unwashed - yes, I mean the French - if we want to progress beyond rat-genocide.
And why? Competition. While EQ was the dominant kid on the fantasy MMO block, they could set the rules. Now they have WoW kicking their collective derrieres, and they feel forced to say "you know, maybe if people want to solo we might have to let them." Competition has bred a sudden urge to drop the proscriptive rules about how we are allowed to play.
All I need to end the week on a more upbeat note is to hear that the entire management structure of EA Games have been killed in a joyously horrendous wood-chipper incident, throughout which they had each been entirely conscious until the very end of their coke-fuelled, liquid-lunch-addled, monopolistic, egoistic, repulsive, saurian existences.