Killed in a smiling accident.

The first MMO that can maintain, throughout the length of its levelling curve, the joy, excitement, wonder and unadulterated fun found in those first ten levels of today’s MMOs, will dominate the market forever.

And it will probably also destabilise the world economy as the entire planetary workforce pulls a year-long skive. If that starts to happen I can only recommend one thing: shares in a major blog or forum hosting company. For if there’s one truism in MMO life, it’s that players will always need a place to pontificate.

The various statistics for these blog sites can be fascinating: browsing through who came to visit you and from where, what posts they read, where they went to afterwards, the colour of their underwear at the time.

I assume then, that it isn’t only me who can’t help experiencing the “I see you” Eye of Sauron effect, every once in while.

I see you. I see you, Frodo Baggins, and your webmail links and Google searches.

One post to rule them all; One link to find them; One keyword to bring them all and in the blog-feed bind them…

In the world of PvP, damage is king. However, crowd control is the wicked, wizened and wiry chancellor whispering suggestions into the king’s ear - the real power behind the throne.

Reading Zoso’s post from yesterday - about Age of Conan’s use of captchas for access to their forum search - made me wonder what sort of clue this might give us as to how their game will operate:

To prevent bots in our game, Age of Conan is pleased to announce a revolutionary new anti-bot technology for our combat system: The Combat Captcha.

For example: you press 1 to activate your Skullsplitter with a Side Order of Extra Gore ability, and a captcha pops up:

It looks like you are trying to crush the cranium of this Cimmerian. To prove that you are a genuine player, please type the word displayed below in order to complete your manoeuvre.

cROm sEz DiE

The letters are formed from the entrails of your previous opponents and framed on a background that looks like the crime scene from a slasher film; if you can identify the word and type it in time, you get to execute the ability, and probably your opponent. Genius!

I think it could work. Gone are the days of mindless key mashing in order to participate in combat, now you have to stay on your toes, improve your typing ability and your reading skills, just to be able to play the game at all!

Look forward to other exciting uses of Internet security technologies to protect your game-play soon, such as the dial-a-spell protection mechanism, where upon attempting to cast a spell a small mathematical problem is displayed on the screen and you must type the answer in on a virtual keypad in order to complete the spell-casting.

Big Brother is watching you play.

Imagine if we, the mass of massively multiplayer online gamers, joined together and formed a corporation, and spent as much time grinding stock markets or crafting real items for sale or farming… well, just farming, as we currently do in MMOs.

Do you think it would be long before we destabilised the world economy?

Up with the Zeitgeist as ever, I was catching up with some WoW articles about some “ubah” guild somewhere abandoning raiding, and general griping about the difficulty of high end raiding and not being rewarded enough for it compared to PvP/heroic 5-mans/spending the same amount of time getting a second (or quite possibly first) job that actually pays real money. I got to thinking… what if it’s all a psychological experiment? There’s Nick Yee’s classic Everquest as the Virtual Skinner Box, maybe bleeding edge WoW raiding is a continuation of the Milgram experiment being performed on the dev team, they’re being ordered to inflict progressively greater tedium on raiders to see if at any point they’d question the orders or refuse to implement them. No dice so far, if the 2.4.1 patch notes mention that wiping in Sunwell Plateau will result in progressively greater electric shocks to players, I reckon the authorities might need to step in…

Compare and contrast:

In PvP you start out as the lowest of the low; your entire aim at this time is to struggle and fight fruitlessly against those who are already established in order to improve your standing, while the established take great delight in picking on you and impaling you with their purple weapons. Eventually though, through nothing more than attrition and sticking in there, you become one of the established and powerful people yourself, at which point you take great delight in punishing the newcomers; for is it not the case that you had to go through the self same thing? And thus the newcomers feel the sting of your purple weapon.

In the archetypal all-boys boarding school you start out as the lowest of the low; your entire aim at this time is to struggle and fight fruitlessly against those who are already established in order to improve your standing, while the established take great delight in picking on you and impaling you with their ‘purple weapons’. Eventually though, through nothing more than attrition and sticking in there, you become one of the established and powerful people yourself, at which point you take great delight in punishing the newcomers; for is it not the case that you had to go through the self same thing? And thus the newcomers feel the sting of your ‘purple weapon’.

PvP: the homoerotic boarding school simulator of MMOs.