Strict MMO Rules

Joe Ludwig asked a few questions I thought to be quite relevant in his Breaking rules post.  The first time I read it I kind of passed right through it, vaguely aware there was something good in that topic, but since at the time I was in the midst of some other train of thought I didn’t ponder it much.  Then, just now I went back and read it again.  Here’s the statement that got me thinking:

Of those, gray shards seem to be the most promising. If you could come up with a way to allow anybody to host a world instance and set the rules in that world, but still keep collecting revenue from those players, you could probably draw a lot of attention.

It struck me that allowing the playerbase to host their own shards is an excellent method of offloading game content and maintenance requirements.  World instances is one thing, but let’s take it a step further.  Why not let player groups create an entire map or set of maps, complete with quests, land forms, and a back story, all of which connect right up to the “real” world?  Well, then they will just make it really easy to obtain major loot in their world that you can sell back in the real one, and the entire game will turn into “who can make the map that’s easiest to make the most money”.  I guess the development company could just cut off rogue maps or something.  You would also have a possible discontinuity in world aesthetics.  Also, you would have to figure out how they would make money- number of players who visit that map, player-hours spent on the map, players that signed up for the game from that map’s web site?

Well, that kind of fizzled.  The “offload content development” ideal even to the point of world design, but a step back from “There” and “Second Life, was exciting for a moment there.  Certain propensities for imbalance, shall we say, would be a bit too much.

The content development capacity of the player base needs to be tapped.  In my experience “Second Life” and “There” are a frustration fest of waiting for all that unique content to download every time you travel further than 50 feet.  I don’t think an MMO needs to go as far as they do in order to have a sufficient capacity for players to feel they can create their own content.