player-involvement
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The Think Tank: How do you feel about community involvement with an MMO's development process?
A game's community has become more important to the development of modern MMOs as studios are paying more and more attention to what the players actually want versus what publishers want. This is evident in games like EVE Online with its player council, and Kickstarter has opened up a whole new avenue for the players to influence that dev process. But sometimes, that player influence isn't always for the best. In the famous words of poet John Lydgate, "You can't please all of the people all of the time." Yet many developers still try. So I threw the question out to the Massively staff to get some fresh opinions. Should we all be able to play the part of an armchair developer, or should we leave the design up to the paid designers?
Anti-Aliased: It will all be fine in ten minutes
Back in the day when a 500 Mhz processor was fast, we were lulled into these weird online universes with multitudes of golden tongued promises. "Play online with thousands of others!", "Make a hero and save detailed and vast worlds!", and, my favorite, "Live in an persistent universe where your actions will have long lasting effects!"Certainly, two of those promises have come true. Our worlds are traveled by thousands upon thousands of users daily, and the characters we have created are truly the stuff of legends who have saved these vast worlds countless times. But the one thing that has still eluded us all this time... persistence.The funny thing is, it's not because we can't program or realize persistence in our games. We have the technology and expertise to do that just fine. We don't have persistence because persistence isn't profitable.
