ArenaNet's MMO Design Manifesto

An anonymous reader writes "ArenaNet studio head Mike O'Brien has posted his vision for a new type of MMORPG, which they used in developing Guild Wars 2. Quoting: 'MMOs are social games. So why do they sometimes seem to work so hard to punish you for playing with other players? If I'm out hunting and another player walks by, shouldn't I welcome his help, rather than worrying that he's going to steal my kills or consume all the mobs I wanted to kill? ... [In Guild Wars 2], when someone kills a monster, not just that player's party but everyone who was seriously involved in the fight gets 100% of the XP and loot for the kill. When an event is happening in the world – when the bandits are terrorizing a village – everyone in the area has the same motivation, and when the event ends, everyone gets rewarded.'"

Warhammer Online

[eeCyaJ]

Sounds sort of like the open quests from Warhammer online. Show up in area, help out, get loot bag. True, there's a ranking system which means if your efforts weren't good enough you won't get anything immediate, but you still earn points which raise your rank in the chapter and (eventually) enable you to pick up useful, class-specific equipment.

It has already been done

[Andtalath]

Dungeons and dragons online already does this.
All XP and rewards you get are based around how you as a group finish the instance (you do get penalties and bonuses depending on how many times you die though, and if you left the dungeon), you always run around with a group and no other characters are visible outside of the cities and all characters in the cities interact with you as if you are on of the few heroes helping it.

No collecting wolves tails there, you help people from level 1 and forward with actual questing which feels like it's helping someone.

Otoh, the game started breaking at around level 8 or so when I played it, especially due to haven essentially eternal gold and quite simply too large monsters which made claustrophobic dungeons pretty much impossible.

Re:PvP could be different - current designs are ba

[ps_inkling]

Or perhaps having every guard in every town on the continent kill you on sight? You think people would randomly attack strangers? Ganking would vanish in a heartbeat. You'd probably end up with a feudal system very quickly, where everyone was in one of a few massive guilds that would issue kill on sight orders for anyone that harmed one of their own- this may not be what the designers/players want, but it would work. Make losing hurt and the ganking issue solves itself

What you are describing was implemented in Ultima Online. Kill a player, all the guards in cities mark you KoS (kill on sight). The solution was to not go to cities anymore. No banking, but there's plenty of killed player corpses to loot.

So, roving gangs of PKers hang out at the load points between areas, and kill your character while your computer is loading the next area's graphics. The solution for a while was the formation of anti PKers, who would descend in mass and swarm a PK group. But, now their characters were also flagged as PKers.

So yes, it ended up as a feudal system. Unfortunately, it was a world where the PK eventually won.

Re:It has already been done

[Splab]

You missed out on a lot then, the later dungeons where absolutely awesome. What kept me playing DDO for years was the teamplaying aspect, was (and still am) bored with WoW kids acting like spoiled brats.

In DDO, no co-op and coordination == wipe, all quests are done easily if you work together, if your tank just rushes off and burns the clerics mana you are dead.
Well it used to be like that, but after level 16 and crafting got introduced the game got too easy (weapons and players where way too powerfull) so I lost interest since you strictly speaking didn't need a group for most quests.