   Obsession with MMOs
  I know a lot of people would really like to develop their own Massively Multiplayer Online Game, and I'm kinda stumped on why this is so popular. Is it just the thought of administrating your own server? Showing off to your friends? Making $$$? Maybe it's all of those..?Anyways, post why you think this is.   
  Well, I'd suspect that the reasons are different for each person.  Here are some reasons I've run into:1) Novelty.  Modern MMOs (I'm not counting MUDs) are relatively new genre.  Its still possible to come up with MMO ideas that are not seen as "Just a rehash of X."2) Ambition.  There's still a lot of untapped potential in massive online games.  People see the potential and want to realize that themselves.  They just don't understand that realizing that potential is extremely difficult, impractical, or impossible.3) Power.  Some people just like the idea of power.  Having a server and a player base gives you power over that player base.  This is appealing to some less-mature people.  Check out how some admins of FPSes behave.4) Money.  They think that its an easy way to get a lot of money.  There's a lot of potential cash-flow in an MMO.  Even a customer base of 10,000 people could probably earn you a decent living (depending on payment rates, etc).  They don't understand that they're very, very unlikely to get that kind of paying subscriber base.5) Knowledge/Challenge.  MMOs require a lot of knowledge in many different areas.  You have to know or learn how to handle networking, graphics, data storage, etc.  You also have to know or learn how to build scalable architecture. This makes it attractive to people who are looking for a challenge or want to gain knowledge in assorted areas.[Edited by - Rycross on August 21, 2009 3:59:13 PM];  That and the fact that most of the people who want to make MMOs play a lot of MMOs and thus think "holy crap MMOs are awesome, I wanna make one!"   ;  Hehe, FPS server admins :P   ;  6) Hawt chicks dig guys with MMOs.   ;  Since I'm working on an MMO (sort of, it has qualities of an MMO), I feel I can answer."Is it just the thought of administrating your own server?"No, this is a complete headache.  My game runs on a computer that's right next to my bed and the fan is always running.  I live in southern California, so it's pretty warm as well, and so the computer running 24/7 generates even more heat.  It also costs some money."Showing off to your friends?"Also no.  No one understands the complexity, the time, the stress and general headaches of making a game like an MMO.  You can't show your 'sort of' gamer friends it, because they just don't appreciate it.  My game probably has around 10ish hours of content right now, and how do I show that in a very short introduction to it?"Making $$$?"Not really.  I didn't start it for money, but now that has come so far, I see money as a possibility.  But I see the amount being enough to justify spending as much time as I have spent on it, not on getting rich.   ;  Here's the real reason why people make MMORPGs (and they might not necessarily know it at the time): lack of gameplay ideas.Developers think that just because you can bring a bunch of people together in a virtual world that their game will automatically become fun to play. Then when they get it running, some of their friends log on and stand around being bored. The developer then wonders what they can add to give his friends something to do.. "I know! I'll let them kill each other! YARRRRRRRR".MMORPGs are usually the genre of choice because they can evolve. A single developer making a side-scroller will finish it in a year or so, and after that he might never see anyone playing / enjoying the game that he made. If he works on an MMORPG and gets it to the stage where people can play it, he can immediately see people playing his game.   ;Quote:Original post by WavarianDevelopers think that just because you can bring a bunch of people together in a virtual world that their game will automatically become fun to play. Then when they get it running, some of their friends log on and stand around being bored. The developer then wonders what they can add to give his friends something to do.. "I know! I'll let them kill each other! YARRRRRRRR".As uncharitable as this is, I think you've hit the nail on the head. I've taken to gritting my teeth at the MMO posts that have clogged the Game Design forums of late because there's not a lot of substance that comes across in many of them. Ideas for classes? Skills? Races? Crafting? Permadeath? Bazillions and more! But if you try to nail people down on unique gameplay mechanics (politics? espionage? dynamically changing the world?) few posters have really had well thought out ideas for doing something different. The majority seem to think that you can just rehash Tolkien, swap out history and place names and throw in some grinding and Blizzard's customer base will beat a path to their door.I really think it's like iPhone development. At some point someone yelled "Eureka!!!" and the gold rush began. What people fail to understand is that just like the real gold rushes of the past, a very, very tiny minority got rich (usually the middlemen) and everyone else went home empty-handed.;Quote:Original post by WavinatorI really think it's like iPhone development. At some point someone yelled "Eureka!!!" and the gold rush began. What people fail to understand is that just like the real gold rushes of the past, a very, very tiny minority got rich (usually the middlemen) and everyone else went home empty-handed.iPhone development still has a lot of good things going for it. It's a platform very suitable to small games and apps that are well within the reach of very small teams or solo developers, and it's relatively easy to get your stuff onto the store. The standards and business savvy you need to make reasonable money off iPhone games might be steadily increasing, but you can still put a handful of months into development and come out with a nice game. That's something you can't do if you're aiming for a WoW beater MMO.My impression is that MMOs popularity in design is partly due to their current popularity, but it also has to do with them being the ideal to a certain type of "everything but the kitchen sink" game design approach. This is where a game idea is made better by globbing in more stuff. You can get lost designing a intricate world with forty game classes and a thousand types of monsters, where everything is on a grand epic scale. It's also very easy to paper over the questions of how it will actually play and be fun by just assuming since it's an MMO players can interact and make their own fun.   ;  I've never aimed to build one but one thing about the discussions of MMO development that I find really interesting is how it gets you to look at civilization and the various institutions that have been around for millenia that we take for granted and we see just how complex and evolved they are.  Justice and economy being the two big ones.   