Make MMO News Again... Go Open Source

[Sterva]

As the title says, go open source with AO. Or at the very least, do a semi open source to the extent that AO players get a development platform to work on the important parts of AO, though not necessarily all of it.

Provide players with a way to gain some sort of access to the AO code and let them try out fixing and making improvements on things, then take the best of those and implement them on live servers.

It's the most revolutionary step you could take as a company, it would make AO a hell of a lot better because things would get fixed faster and you would draw on a larger creative base of talent for new things, and in all honesty, it's where gaming is going to head eventually anyways. You can be the first to recognize it, or you can wait for someone else to do it first.

[Doctorhyde]

It would kill off 1/2 the playerbase within 24 hours. I mean literally kill. From laughter.

[shadowgod]

As the title says, go open source with AO. Or at the very least, do a semi open source to the extent that AO players get a development platform to work on the important parts of AO, though not necessarily all of it.

Provide players with a way to gain some sort of access to the AO code and let them try out fixing and making improvements on things, then take the best of those and implement them on live servers.

It's the most revolutionary step you could take as a company, it would make AO a hell of a lot better because things would get fixed faster and you would draw on a larger creative base of talent for new things, and in all honesty, it's where gaming is going to head eventually anyways. You can be the first to recognize it, or you can wait for someone else to do it first.

revolutionary... uh.. yeah... FC should just go ahead and write player-controlling bots for people instead. would be alot quicker.

remember kids, "Open Source" is like a Hammer. its not the solution to everything.

[SF_MileWorf]

As soon as players start tampering around the game, ill stop playing.
debump for open source

[If6was9]

As the title says, go open source with AO. Or at the very least, do a semi open source to the extent that AO players get a development platform to work on the important parts of AO, though not necessarily all of it.

Provide players with a way to gain some sort of access to the AO code and let them try out fixing and making improvements on things, then take the best of those and implement them on live servers.

It's the most revolutionary step you could take as a company, it would make AO a hell of a lot better because things would get fixed faster and you would draw on a larger creative base of talent for new things, and in all honesty, it's where gaming is going to head eventually anyways. You can be the first to recognize it, or you can wait for someone else to do it first.

For the game dynamics this might be a bit much. But for creating new content - items, missions and/or cities - it could be very cool.

[rakhabit]

It'll be awesome like second life where you see 12foot tall penises walking around and furries will have a strong foothold in Omni Ent

[Taranide]

Everyone making their dreams come true and leave everyone else behind. Debump.

[Jenshiye]

Tool set similar to Morrowind, then moderate what people make before implementation. Have item templates for stats so that QL & type X = z, y and w.

[thyll]

Here is what they could do.

For sure, not all open source. Disaster. The low level important stuff should be kept closed, however graphical improvements, game improvements, etc which will not go into the areas of balancing and stat redistribution (for security reasons) could be added. Funcom could have a separate quality assurance team which would look at additions to the game, evaluate them, stick them on a test server, where the regular Quality Assurance team/players/bug hunters will look at them, squash the bugs, and then deploy them to live.

Making the whole thing opensource is not a good idea of course, because people can develop hacking tools easier.

However, I do agree that the computer world is indeed moving to this. I see more and more projects everyday. http://sourceforge.com

May be something to consider.

-Thyll

[PingBong]

eh i think what the original post ment was to make it possible for random people to fix/improve ao technical crap not to affect the gameplay itself

would it be possible tho? i doubt it, for one it would make ao and its clients way more vulnerable also most of ao bugs are buried within the server side code and giving that to the public would be as good as writing an instruction book to making private servers (players wouldnt mind sure but fc would )

and tbh computer world isnt moving that way, its just diversing more.. implementing open source to a mmo such as ao would require a coding masterpiece with large focus on keeping some stuff seperated which im afraid ao is not