Well I've played so many games and am an old fart so I don't know where to begin. Well perhaps I do. Let's start with a game I played for over 9 years and is still active today.
Gemstone III - Started at a base of 50 people and was an original mud owned by I.C.E. and then when put onto AOL started wracking up 2,000 people at one time on peek hours. It became the very first massive multi-player game and had more subscribers than any other game at the current time. Had its own graphical front end and added some nice features to make MUD'ing work well. The reason why its alive today?
Reason 1 - Social Lives - Most of the people playing are mature (ages 20 - 60 in real life) They have their own personalities, and a rich storyline to thrive on. Friends don't leave because they build on the friendships and have Simucons and Vegascons where players meet and form social bonds outside of the game.
Reason 2 - Character Personalization - You can customize and alter any piece of clothing/item you wear to make elaborate descriptions. No two people look alike. You have custom armor, weapons, and even housing. The custom houses you own can have their own furnishings and even though it costs a lot it can be done in great detail. You can choose the area you want to live in and the real estate can go up or down depending on game events. You can add custom descriptions and real time effects to your house as well. You even have guild houses that were custom built from the ground where you can go in and store items in your own private locker and sit at tables and order food etc.
The Downfalls - Its a MUD - well an elaborate MUD. They take up to 2 years to fix bugs and to do simple profession balancing. The reason people don't mind is because they enjoy the social aspects to the game which more than make up for the bugs.
The cost - 12.95 for one character (yep one single character). $32.95 a month for a premium account which allows you 10 characters. $79.95 a month for a platinum account which allows you special services.
How many people are still on at peak hours now today at the present time? 968 people online.
Everquest - I won't go into this popular game because people already know the good and the bad but I will touch on the auction system that was revamped. The ability to sell your items while you are offline is something fabulous. AO should implement a similar feature or hi-tech bazaar.
(NOW THEN)
Things that will make AO better and help the future of the game.
1. Create public housing and guild housing. Elaborate more on houses and guild houses. Allow full furniture customization. Allow for mood music to be selective within your own apartment (zone). Allow for ratio furniture placement and limit the pieces to 50 per apartment. Allow for banking in guild houses and public houses. Allow players to buy entire structures. Allow players to customize their own structures.
2. Fix "custom missions" on the mission terminals. This would allow people to make their own custom missions to ****e up the adventure some. I know all about the no-drop exploits that people used on that feature in the past but c'mon its been months upon months now and its still not working as intended.
3. ****e up the Storyline. One of the greatest things about some of the special games I have played is that when a storyline was present, monsters (mobs) could be created in waves to simulate an area attack and yet I have not seen one large scale area attack or multiple scale area attacks since the attacks on lush resorts with the cyborgs. Correct me here someone but I believe the borgs were the only ones and that was a lot of fun while it lasted. They also pushed again in Avalon during the same time as well. Create "popular" public appearances that are NPC run for notables like Phillip Ross, etc. but don't bugger up the appearances by letting players kill them easily *cough*. Create more "animosity type" figures that can interract and cause some stir in the community at any given time so that people start spreading rumors about the tyranny of such and such.
4. Create more content and rich areas to explore. Add snow. Fix the weather on Rubi-ka. Yes I'm omni and it is quite well known that they originally tampered and screwed up the weather biosphere machines on the planet which causes the sporadic problems on rubi-ka. Allow for unusual texturing in certain areas so that everything doesn't seem so dark and foreboding all of the time.
5. Add more character animations. Add more facial, body, features. Create body chop shops that allow for people to go in and customize their body with tattoos and change their face and appearance for a price whenever they want. Let people control their looks and the feel of their clothing, armor, weapons.
More will follow later...
Feel free to add..
How hard would it be for a Funcom held pvp tourney? Or gm mediated attack on cyborg billets to rescue innocent hostages? (Key word being mediate. If I see another greenie who does all the action while players stand around and complain about lag, I'm shooting it.)
Woo hoo!
