Quote:
Originally Posted by t0lkien
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Yes. There is no way to design away people being assholes without removing all the meaningful interaction from games (i.e. every modern MMO in existence now).
If you want gameplay freedom, it will always include the ability to be an asshole. Kind of like life.
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I don't know just how much I agree with this. Certainly, there are always going to be assholes, but the problem that occurs is the centralization of assholes in endgame due to the job-like nature of it.
End game in most MMOs are fairly similar, but EverQuest did the build up levels in a very different way by early design, and it creates what, in my opinion was, the best structure to date in a MMO for creating some decency and putting consequences on assholish behavior.
Assholes exist in real life, there is certainly that element, but it happens significantly more when people are able to act independently of one another, and not rely upon one another for means of survival or for means of attaining goals. So long as people actively view that they need others, assholish behavior which removes their potential to gain the help of others, puts them at a significant disadvantage, and is discouraged.
This is what I loved about much of the early and build up to EverQuest... Before you have a guild, before you have a raiding organization or whatever you wish to look at it as, each person is in a game world where death has major consequence, where travel is difficult, where each person needs others to really make their way through this game with any relative ease. The game servers were each, individually, small enough, and leveling was arduous enough that your name had attached to it a certain reputation. Being an asshole gave you a reputation, and you could start to feel the negative consequences of that behavior through reduces ports, reduced rezzes, and the like. This made the game ultimately harder.
What removes this is when you do what WoW has done and you instance off everything, and let people random queue into whatever you want. Or when you do what EQ did and let NPCs replace the function of people, allowing each player to act independent of the rest of the player base. Or, what simply happens as an EQ world gets older, people join up into raiding guilds and groups, and can be assholes to those not in that group because each guild is a self-contained organization that can provide for every aspect of what the player requires, freeing them up to terrorize or be assholes to the rest of the player base.
Most games, you get assholes from the start. EverQuest at least pushed it off until you were looking at raiding and the endgame. I'd like to believe that there is a way to structure a game which takes advantage of this player interdependence all the way to endgame, rather than it ending when you look at raiding. It may come with the cost of there being no raiding, or being another type of endgame content.
But like I said at the start, I don't know how much I agree or disagree with the idea that it is inevitable. If it is possible to keep reputation costs mattering at high level, then I think it will be possible. However, if there is no way to keep one's reputation mattering at higher level, then it probably is inevitable. Classic EQ had the advantage of a very short timeline relative to Project 1999, so we have significantly more clustering and xenophobia created between guilds as they cluster and build up, ultimately leading to the type of negative and crappy behavior that we see as rampant. I don't have an answer in mind as to how to keep reputation as important, or rather how to keep players relying upon each other, when they are able to join together into guilds and become self-contained units. And I definitely don't have an answer as to how to do it for as long as it would be needed here. Hence, I am not sure how much I agree or disagree yet.