Monthly Archives: August 2008

West Van Dean Hemlock-Chilli FiestaCon

The air is filled with pulsing latin rhythms from a salsa band, ice cream vans are poised to dispense frozen dairy treats, food stalls offer tastes of the Caribbean, Orient and other exotic destinations, fiery chilli peppers adorn every stall, and vividly coloured sombreros are much in evidence. Everything is set for VanHemCon ’08, operating undercover as the West Dean Chilli Fiesta.

Still, being back in good old Blighty after a week’s holiday, there was one more element to complete things, namely torrential rain (though having been away in Ireland that wasn’t so different). The ice cream vans weren’t doing much of a trade, the salsa band were huddled in a tent and the sombreros were either being worn ironically or as ad-hoc head-mounted umbrellas (usually both, I suspect).

Still, it takes more than the threat of drowning to put off hardy adventurers. The best laid schemes o’ mice n’ men nearly ganged a-gley, as they aft do, when mobile phone reception proved distinctly patchy; one faint bar of signal seemed to exist in the area of trouser pockets, but when removing the phone to actually make or receive a call it promptly vanished. Communication was established in the end, and thanks in no small part to Bob‘s hat contact was made. With a bit of luck (and some heavy editing) the results might make an appearance at a podcast near you before too long.

Chilli-wise, I avoided the more dangerous stuff with skull-emblazoned labels and lengthy disclaimers; my pick of the show is a rather excellent Green Jalapeño dipping jam. Great for general dipping, and pepping up a cheese sandwich.

Littlest MMObo.

For all you wandering MMO hobos out there:

There’s a voice that keeps on calling me
Down the road is where I’ll always be

Every stop I make, I’ll make a new friend
Can’t stay for long, just turn around and I’m gone again.

Maybe tomorrow, I’ll want settle down,
Until tomorrow, I’ll just keep moving on.

Down this road, that never seems to end,
Where new adventure, lies just around the bend.

So if you want to join me for a while
Just grab your hat, come travel light – that’s hobo style.

Maybe tomorrow, I’ll want settle down,
Until tomorrow, the whole world is my home.

So if you want to join me for a while
Just grab your hat, come travel light
That’s hobo style.

Maybe tomorrow, I’ll want settle down,
Until tomorrow, I’ll just keep moving on.

There’s a world, that’s waiting to unfold,
A brand new tale, no one has ever told,

We’ve journey’d far but, you know it won’t be long,
We’re almost there and we’ve paid our fare, with the hobo song.

Maybe tomorrow, I’ll want settle down,
Until tomorrow, I’ll just keep moving on.

So if you want to join me for a while
Just grab your hat, come travel light – that’s hobo style.

Maybe tomorrow, I’ll find what I call home
Until tomorrow, you know I’m free to roam.

Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.

As those of you who follow the MMO scene may have heard, I think it has been mentioned once or twice in the blogosphere, Warhammer Online is fast approaching and the song of the Hype Harpy is reaching a fever pitch, and with her siren melody she has driven many bloggers mad in a frothing frenzy of fanboyism

To me WAR is looking like it might be some form of game, one that could be played for some measure of time, and that will perhaps involve a modicum or more of entertainment. Anything else would be fancy and speculation, even with beta experience, because no beta that I’ve ever been involved in has ever represented or accurately reflected the experience that Joe and Jane Normalplayer will see when they enter the game on its official launch, much less a beta buried beneath such a writhing groping horde of intertwined fanboys, like some sort of bastard chaos child of Tzeentch’s hope, ambition, scheming and lies, and Slaanesh’s self-indulgence and excess, all arms and legs and salivating biting groaning heads.

Having said all that, I don’t think it hurts for normal people to get somewhat interested in events per se, and a little forward planning avoids hasty decisions come launch day and the inevitable regret and re-rolling that shortly follows; well, it avoids it for most people, alas I am a lost cause and I expect several character re-rolls have already been soothsaid for me by the Oracle of Delphi.

It appears that some very organised souls on the colonial side of the pond have already started on the initial formation of a guild, and I suppose it is worth staking an initial flag (Do you have a flag? No flag, no country.) in the ground atop Mount OrganisationalShambles and seeing if there are any EU bloggers or blog readers who are interested in forming a guild. We’ll need a name and a flag, I shall offer forward ‘The Sodality of the Tankard-and-Sword’, ‘The Gentlemen Scoundrels’ or ‘Guardians of the Golden Gourd’ as an initial salvo for a guild name, and let counter offers, abuse or just plain ambivalence follow.

Other than pondering on the shape and form of a guild, I’ve been trying to work out which class I’m going to play at launch. I mentioned before that I’d narrowed it down to either the Ironbreaker or the Warrior Priest, but was very much torn between the two. I usually play healer to the merry band of adventurers (consisting of Zoso, Elf, another of our friends who is a blog abstainer, and anyone else who happens to want to tag along) and it’s a role that I enjoy and one where I can often be found ‘rocking the socks’, as I believe they say on the street. However, I loves me a good dwarf, if you know what I mean (and I think you do), but they never seem to be of a class that I fancy playing; that is, they never usually have an appealing healer class.

So what is it with race/class restrictions in MMOs these days, why does there have to be this somewhat arbitrary ruling that dwarves, picking an example entirely at random of course, can’t be Warrior Priests. I mean, of all the types of healing classes that I would see as fitting with the concept of a dwarf, a plate-wearing, hammer-wielding religious nutter in the midst of battle would pretty much sum it up perfectly. I know that Lore (Huh. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, say it again now…) is often cited as the reason that, say, Gnomes can’t be Druids, and Dwarves can’t be Shaman in WoW, for example, but then the developers will throw all Lore (Huh. What is it good for? Etc.) to the four corners of the world when it suits them. Death Knights and Blood Knights and retcons, oh my. So Lore (Huh. What… stop that!) is a fairly weak excuse, and other than that, it seems to be nothing more than a way to differentiate races a little. And this is ‘the suck’, as I believe they say in the brothels.

Isn’t it time we dropped these arbitrary restrictions that force players to make choices that have no worth in terms of game-play or balance, and could otherwise allow them the freedom to play the race and class of their choosing?

Anyway, bearing in mind that I’ve no beta experience so only have the website information and various YouTube beta videos of game-play to go on, I was generally resigned to the fact that I’d roll one of each of the classes I’d decided on and try them for a few levels and see which one took my fancy the most. And the Oracle of Delphi laughed maniacally as the Prophecy of Alts came to pass.

Or so it thought.

However, Fate decided to poke the Oracle in the eye with a spoon or something, because I read some information the other day on the ever informative, if not entirely accurate at all times, Warhammer Online Wiki. It was whilst browsing around the site that I stumbled across the page pertaining to mounts, and more specifically the page for the dwarf mount.

Let me express to you, in one syllable, my hatred for cutesy faux-steampunk impossible-to-build machines of utterly stupid design that are crammed into fantasy settings because the designers and artists couldn’t bothered to try to create and animate a bear, or wolf, or ram or any other decent bloody animal mount that they could have picked:

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHRGHHH.

Sorry, that was more than one syllable, I sort of choked on my own bile at the end there.

I know that Paul Barnett apparently didn’t want WAR’s designers ripping-off WoW, but did they at least investigate mounts and their popularity? Do you know how many pages there are out on that wide web o’ the world that are dedicated to getting a different racial mount for a Gnome in WoW, so as to avoid the embarrassment of riding around on an metal ostrich that has second stage heroin withdrawal symptoms. Let me tell you, it’s a lot of pages, there’re probably more pages than you can see stars in the sky at night. Those hideously naff motorised mounts, and yes I acknowledge that there are three of you out there that do actually like them, are just the most stupid, the most ridiculous, the most obviously contrived attempt at being cute outside of the dancing murloc with the top hat.

I’ve got nothing against Steampunk you understand, when crafted with care it’s a fantastic genre and an acceptable addition to a straight-laced fantasy world, but by the seven gods these wibble-wobbling, smoke-puffing, clattering contrivances are not Steampunk.

Is Arsepunk a genre yet? Because I think these mounts would fight right in.

It’s a fickle decision I know, but it at least leaves me free to pick my initial choice, the Warrior Priest without too much regret, and although a horse is utterly boring as a mount, it’s a thousand fold better than a moronic deity-damned helicopter bloody backpack thing. Graaarrrgh!

And relax.

I do regret that I can’t play a dwarf warrior priest with an armoured bear mount, but MMOs aren’t about what the players want, they’re about what the developers are willing to let them have.

I have to wonder, though, if there are many other people like me (with regards to MMO decisions like this, not whether there are other moderately insane people blathering to themselves on a public blog), or are the majority of players like Zoso, who tends to pick a race and class that they think they’ll get on ok with, and then settle into it regardless of whether certain aspects of the race/class might not appeal quite as much as those from another race/class later on. Whether I’m in the minority or the majority, I have to confess that I envy the easy commitment that those on the other side of the picket fence of character creation enjoy.

So this time I’m determined to follow in the committed footsteps of those others, and it’s the Warrior Priest and no alts for me.

Why do I hear the Oracle of Delphi laughing so?

A question.

To the one hundred and thirty or so bloggers out there who posted the Warhammer Online release date, with perhaps a token copy and paste of the blurb output by Mythic’s ineluctable hype machine.

Why?

I have a copy of the Warhammer Online newsletter in my inbox this morning, one whole day after having to trawl through an RSS Feed List that was triple its normal size, and guess what that newsletter tells me, here’s a hint: it’s not telling me anything to do with the release date of Wrath of the Lich King.

Does this stem from that laughable notion that bloggers are somehow related to the press? Is this some sort of “Stop the presses!” “Hold the front page!” mentality, because if you hadn’t noticed there are no presses, and the front pages of blogs don’t need to be held (they are in fact quite self confident and don’t need the comforting reassurance of someone’s body pressed against them). There is no scoop to be had, because this is not a format where if you get the story out ahead of your rivals they may not be able to repeat the story to their readership for a whole day because they missed their print deadline.

And what boggles the mind more are those who post a day or even two later with such one line news items. Did you even look at your RSS feeds before you posted? Did you not see the one HUNDRED posts already stating exactly the same? And you… you posted it anyway.

Let us all take a moment to bow our heads, close our eyes, clasp our hands together and boggle quietly to ourselves.

Boggle

Please, for the love of whichever Almighty it is that you observe, stop doing this. Next time you decide to post release date ‘news’, try to add two or three paragraphs of insightful commentary on why this is an interesting event and what it means in the context of the MMO genre. If you can’t do it, then it’s probably not worth posting it; do you really think that you’re informing anyone? Let’s face it, if your blog is not alphabetically first in people’s RSS reader of choice, you’re already posting old information.

Cue a raft of blogs named AAA MMO Blog and AAAAA MMO Blog.

There is a hypothetical being, we shall call him Toh Ken, who is crouched over a steam powered cog-based computer console in the basement of a monastery high in the mountains of Xiahe County, and who is only now managing to read the first few posts from his RSS reader which takes three days to process the feed through its analytical engine and then scribe the content onto vellum using a small feather quill attached to a miniature piston-driven brass arm.

To Toh Ken you are, perhaps, posting astonishing and fascinating news. To everyone else in the world, you are just posting token 1up-post-count content.

Stop it.

The tongue of the slanderer is brother to the dagger of the assassin.

I finished playing Mass Effect the other night, it’s a good game but quite short if you fail to undertake all the side quests that it throws at you, so I was rather surprised when the end credits started rolling. Still, not a huge problem because I have Assassin’s Creed and Gears of War sitting on the back burner waiting for me. I decided to go with Assassin’s Creed first, just because I thought a bit of fantasy would be a nice break, having sci-fi’d myself out a bit for the time being with Mass Effect.

So, Assassin’s Creed it is. I’ve only just started playing the game, so here are some brief first impressions.

The game is gorgeous with a capital ‘oh I think I need to change my underwear’. The cities in the game are beautifully realised, detailed and utterly believable; the immersion factor from the scenery is approaching ‘total’ on the enthrall-o-meter. However, the game-play elements quickly whip out a silent deadly blade, stick one hand around the graphic’s mouth and stab it squarely in the back. There’re the Convenient Monks of Convenience and their incredible ability to turn up and have a bit of an aimless wander around just at the point where you might need to get into a guarded building. For those of you unfamiliar with the game, you have the ability to blend with these white robed monks, which essentially translates to you standing in the centre of a diamond formation of four monks, after which guards will ignore you. First problem: it’s the same four monks, in the same formation every time; the blending feature is a fantastic idea, but would it really have been that tricky to vary the size of the group of monks, and perhaps make the group more than four large, because that leads us on to the second problem: these must be the most stupid guards in the world if they can’t spot the odd one out, here you try:

You are a guard in front of the keep of your master, who is very wary of assassins attempting to approach him and introduce his pancreas to the wrong end of a short sharp blade. You have been tasked with guarding the entrance at all costs, and thus you examine the crowds as they wander past. You see a group of monks approaching. You inspect them more closely.

You see five monks, the first monk is wearing a white robe. The second monk is wearing a white robe. The third monk is wearing a white robe. The fourth monk is wearing a white robe. The fifth monk is wearing a white robe; he also appears to have a longsword hanging by his left leg, a small short blade strapped across his back, five throwing knives strapped to the back of his right shoulder and leather arm bracers that look suspiciously as though they might conceal blades.

Do you:

a) Ask the fifth monk if he’s an assassin and trying to kill your master.
a) Raise the alarm and prepare for the fight of your life as you try to apprehend an assassin.
a) Ask your fellow guard mates to just confirm that that bloke in the middle of the four monks is clearly an assassin and that you should all probably hit him with sharp metal sticks.

or

b) Ignore the group of monks, clearly they’re just wandering into your master’s keep because they enjoy sight-seeing around the military garrisons of the old world.

If you answered ‘a’, well done, reward yourself with a small chocolate coated biscuit. If you answered ‘b’, oh dear, punish yourself with a small chocolate coated brisket.

The other stand-out farcical element is the journey on horseback between cities. Again the animation and scenery is breathtaking, and then you ride past a set of guards at anything faster than a gentle canter and all hell breaks loose and they attempt to chase you down and kill you. I just didn’t realise that they had such speed limits in place in the medieval Middle East. Each time you ride out is like an episode of Smokey and the Bandit in the Middle Ages, with you trying to make your way as quickly as possible to the next city before you die of boredom, all the while trying to avoid the speed traps set by old smokey, and when you inevitably set one off, a chase sequence that makes Cannonball Run look like Bullet.

I guess it’s amusing in its own way, and I now make a “Breaker, breaker for the Bandit.” “Come on back, breaker.” “Well, what’s your handle son and what’s your 20?” “My handle is Smokey Bear and I’m tail grabbin’ your ass right now!” commentary as I ride along, which brightens things up a little, if nothing else.

Other than that I haven’t really experienced enough of the game to say whether I like it sufficiently to recommend it to others (unless you happen to like cheesy ’80s comedy police chases, in which case by all means grab it, breaker breaker) but I will say that the combat feels pretty clunky at the moment, with nice ideas in the special moves available, but with the implementation leaving something to be desired. Maybe I just need more practice.

Or maybe I need to stop air-guitaring Battle Without Honor or Humanity and concentrate more on the fight at hand instead.

Reviewlet: Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson.

Following Zoso’s post regarding the freebies available for a short time on Tor, I took the opportunity to grab a couple of the books on offer and have myself a bit of a read. Unfortunately the books listed didn’t have any descriptions listed alongside, and being the lazy bugger that I am I couldn’t be bothered to research each one on Amazon. So I went for the <voice style=”reverb: on; volume: booming; pitch: low”>random click of destiny</style> and hoped that I’d picked something I could get in to.

The first book was John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, a decent enough space romp with a slightly different take on the ‘downloadable personality’ theme as seen in Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon and elsewhere. Scalzi has created a universe that is both interesting and believable, with compelling races and individuals that leave you wanting to find out more about them, and although the main story is a little uninspiring, the secondary storyline – based around the main character himself, his history and the moral dilemmas he faces as life as he knows it is turned on its head – allows the reader to really engage with the book as a whole and to be immersed in the ideas and themes that Scalzi presents. Obvious comparisons can be drawn to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and, as mentioned earlier, Morgan’s Altered Carbon, so if you enjoyed either of those two books then you probably won’t be disappointed with Old Man’s War.

The second book was Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn: The Final Empire, a really rather excellent fantasy story that pleasantly surprised me with its well presented world, its likeable-without-being-mawkish characters and the real star of the show: Allomancy.

Allomancy is the system of magic that Sanderson has created, and instead of having it as some innate unseen power that requires hugely bearded men to sit hunched over dusty old tomes for years on end to achieve, Allomancy instead manifests itself as more of a mutation that is powered by various metals that the Allomancer must ingest and then ‘burn’ to activate the power. There are a number of known metals that can be used in this way, each giving the Allomancer a different power when they burn the metal, but they gain this power only for as long as the metal lasts since it is consumed as the Allomancer uses the power, hence the term ‘burning’ to represent the use of the power. Unlike magic in many other books though, the art of Allomancy is still not entirely understood, and this leaves the door open for things to be twisted around and for plenty of surprises to be unleashed on the main characters and the reader.

The world of the Final Empire is one of a class of nobles who rule over an underclass of slaves known as Skaa, all of whom are presided over by the Lord Ruler, the hero of a past age, who is now immortal – a shard of God – and controls the land with an iron fist. The lands themselves are a depressing affair, with what little vegetation that manages to grow under the ash-filled sky being nothing but dull brown; nobody knows what colourful plants look like, although it is hinted that they did exist in the time before the ascension of the Lord Ruler.

The story is nothing out of the ordinary, with the standard framework of the underclass rising up to overthrow their oppressors through the efforts of a select band of unlikely heroes, but it does throw some nice twists in along the way. However, there is an undercurrent of another story which is not fully expounded upon, and The Final Empire clearly leaves the door wide open for the second and third books to sate the reader’s desire to find out more about the trials of the Lord Ruler a thousand years ago: what was this Deepness that he faced? And if he succeeded in defeating it as we are led to believe, why did the land change so much for the worse afterwards? There are some answers in the first book, just enough to whet the appetite and keep the reader wanting more as the main story of the first book comes to its, perhaps inevitable, conclusion.

I could best describe Mistborn: The Final Empire as having a strong bouquet of Eddings, with a light fragrant sensation of Jordan on the palette and subtle undertones of Lynch and Gemmell.

It’s a credit to Tor, and hopefully in its own small way encouraging to authors and publishers out there, that I’ve already ordered all three books in the series, and I’m certainly keen to find out what the story is behind this fascinating world that Sanderson has created. I bought the first book because, although having read it, I’d like to give the author the sale, and there’s nothing like having a paper copy of a book, the creased and wrinkled spine and loose well-fingered pages a simple testament to one’s enjoyment of the story within. So putting a free copy of the first book in the series on to the web has resulted in at least one new fan, and a few sales, and more importantly I’d like to think that I’m not out of the ordinary in doing so. Not only that, but it has also inspired this little reviewlet which I hope, in turn, might turn some of you on to the idea of trying this excellent little trilogy yourselves.

Well done Tor for seeing the advantage in this sort of marketing strategy, and I hope it works out well for the authors involved.

Massive Effects.

Are badgers simply the criminal element of Ger society, and somewhere in the wild there is an as yet undiscovered policing subfamily of blue and white striped Mustelidae called the goodger?

Who knows! I must confess that it was just meant as a distraction, a piece of flavoursome bait placed carefully on the ground, covered in leaf litter and attached to a thick vine rope that will snag you by the leg, swing you up into the captive audience tree and force you to hang there so that I can bludgeon you with rather rudimentary ruminations regarding MMOs without risk of reprisal.

My apologies.

But hey, now that you’re here and conveniently immobilised hanging upside down by your mind’s leg (a bit like your mind’s eye, but it allows your mind to wander), I feel perhaps that you would be receptive to a little wistful blathering on my part about one of my favourite hobbies. If during the course of my diatribe you start to feel faint, hallucinate or develop an intense migraine, it is possibly just the blood rushing to your head as you dangle there, on the other hand these are also known side effects when listening to me for any extended period of time.

So the real question I want to pose is this: is ‘massive’ the wrong focus for multiplayer online RPGs?

I’ve recently started playing Mass Effect due to my need for a single player game that can be dropped at the scream of a baby (which is like the drop of a hat, only faster and requiring more poo clearing), and for the short amount of time that I’ve played it I’ve enjoyed the experience tremendously. However, somewhere at the back of my mind there is the parasite of dissatisfaction, nibbling delicately on my pia mater and making me wonder how much better the game would be if my two fellow adventurenauts weren’t controlled by an AI suffering dementia on a scale that would make HAL’s red eye turn green with envy, but were instead controlled by my close friends, who I am happy to report are not demented in the slightest. Although based on the witterings of this post, that may not be as much of an endorsement as I had intended. Fighting the parasite of dissatisfaction are the antibiotics of immersion, which help me to look past the fact that my compatriots in the game have had their intelligence modelled on the philosophies and theorems of an especially thick oak sideboard and their movement routines lifted wholesale from the frantic rampage of a hyperactive puppy with chronic diarrhoea, by pointing out that all the NPCs, every other character in the game in fact, is a paragon of subtle method acting and restrained existence. There are no crowds of people whizzing past me at full pelt blowing raspberries and emoting in spurious ways, no diplomats or traders spinning through three hundred and sixty degrees as they bounce back and forward between two spots of the queue they’re waiting in. None of them dance naked on top of the Citadel tour guide terminals. Everyone I speak to uses sentences, none of them talk in tongues, I mean not one person has shouted out in the alien embassies “HAI EVR1 LUVS ME COS I TLK LEIK GIBBON”.

The level of immersion is intense. Well apart from the times when I, as commander, tell my squad to move forward and hold a position; off we charge, assault rifles blazing, I’m taking a bit of damage, actually a bit more damage than I should if I was being given covering fire and so I search around for said coverers. Lo and behold, my squad have in actual fact run in the opposite direction to the one I commanded and are even now having a competition to see who can repeatedly ram their crotch the hardest into the sentry gun we skirted around earlier, while it merrily plugs away at the privates’ privates.

The thought that followed was: could I have had this experience in World of Warcraft? I’m talking about the immersion part here not the crotch ramming team-mate part, for that I’d just need to join the first pick-up group I could find. The answer was: quite possibly, if I’d taken the time to learn how to run a private (read pirate) server, a server where I just granted accounts to my friends, and perhaps a few of their closest friends. The world would still be populated with NPCs, the major cities would be no more empty than they currently are, Shattrath, Ogrimmar and Stormwind excepted, and yet the world would be entirely devoid of smacktards intent on ruining your gaming experience in whatever manner possible.

I then wondered, what if WoW itself was like that by default? Instead of logging into a single server with a population of six thousand people, what if guilds in the game actually had their own instance of a server? You’d log into your server and all the PCs would be guild mates, and they’d all (assuming you were sensible with who you invited) share the same goals and want the same things from the game. What advantages might this set-up have?

For a start, players would feel more like the hero in the traditional fantasy tale, part of a select group of individuals who were destined to change the world, not a nondescript part of the shambling mass of quest tourists and January Loot Sale fanatics that currently ravage Azeroth on a daily basis. The community would be small and close knit, and individuals in that community would have greater opportunities to make a name for themselves and create legends around their character. It would be easier to make player-driven storylines, because giving just one character the Immortal Songblade of Arsewhopping on a server wouldn’t mean that thousands of other players were missing out on having that item. It would also be easier to allow players on a small guild server to be able to affect the world around them in a way that mattered and changed it permanently, because again it wouldn’t be denying that experience to thousands of other players. I also imagine that the virtual world would feel less claustrophobic, because when you take your first tentative steps into the foreboding Forest of Dark & Doom[TM], you wouldn’t peer around the first set of trees only to see an entirely deforested swampland with the indigenous population of Flaming Hellforged Dire Wolves of Armageddon dashing past you, yelping and with their tails between their legs, as one hundred and forty adventurers clatter after them screaming “LOOOOOL”.

Not to mention that you could kiss goodbye to any gold seller chat and mail spam, because without an invite to your server, they’re not getting near you. There could be a public server for trial accounts, and I’m sure the gold sellers would make the place the home of their verbal fallout, but from a subscription sales point of view, it would only encourage players to subscribe and join their own private haven free from such unctuous spiced ham and the inevitable vituperation that follows.

There are many disadvantages even outside of the technical limitations, of course, but those that I have thought of so far are not all that bad, and certainly worth enduring to remove the smacktarded majority whilst maintain the ability to explore and adventure with others. Auction houses, for example, could be linked between server instances, so that all saleable items appeared to all players of the game, hence a universal economy would exist even with the worlds being instanced. And although there’s no real solution to the ‘fancy meeting you here’ effect, where you just happen to meet the same fellow adventurers day after day, you can look at it another way: Lord of the Rings would have been even harder to keep up with if the main cast had changed entirely on a daily basis, and besides, it’s not really any different from having a guild that you regularly group to the exclusion of pickup groups and others.

Obviously this is all dependent on the type of MMO. Planetside, for example, would probably be pretty dull with forty to fifty people on the server, although having said that, Starsiege Tribes didn’t have many more per game, and it was still brilliant fun, but then its maps were a lot smaller. EVE lends itself well to having as many concurrent players as its infrastructure can handle, but then its ‘world’ is actually a universe, which slightly edges out the two meagre continents of Azeroth in terms of ‘space for player to spread out in’.

Perhaps my point isn’t that these multiplayer games should not be massive at all, but that the measure of the massiveness shouldn’t necessarily be the number of concurrent players in the world but could in certain circumstances focus on the number of instances of the world. Just look at the constant demand for new servers from players in World of Warcraft, who want a fresh start and another crack at the world before everything has been done and completed; if the game offered you the chance to create a new fresh instance of the world whenever you wanted, and to only invite those people who you consider to be friends or to have the same play-style or mindset as you, would people find less of a problem with reaching the end-game and stagnating?

Although, all things considered, I have enough problems with alternative characters in MMOs, without the option of creating alternative worlds.

I think I just invented multiversitus.

Anyway, must dash, I can hear goodger sirens approaching; they must have found that stash of bread and milk I stole from old Mrs Crumbly’s garden.