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http://thatsaterribleidea.com/ - A tag-team MMORPG and game design blog. We aim to gain and relay an understanding the mechanics of current MMORPGs while presenting ideas for the future.
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The most common calculation performed when determining the value of a game is price per hour. This calculation works under the assumption that time spent in-game correlates to fun provided. If you consider a game as an activity that takes a certain number of hours before it is completed and ...
MMO
Turbine
thatsaterribleidea.com - 46 hours ago
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thatsaterribleidea.com —
Goal generation is fundamentally a social endeavor. In
real life, a person’s goals are largely dictated by...
the people with which that person socializes. Your friends relate their goals to you and you, to stay friends with them, align your ...
(more)
Goal Generation in MMOs: The Problem
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found this 46 hours agofound this
Here’s one of those oh-so-useless posts where I link you to a bunch of random pages that you probably will never read or care about. The idea here is to spread some good stuff that I’ve read in the hope that I don’t have to cover the same material, but instead can reference it freely without ...
MMO
The world is full of corporate speak and euphemisms . Global warming, itself a buzzphrase of great power, has been replaced by “climate change.” People no longer die, they instead “pass away.” MMOs are “cutting edge” games where “thousands of players” can “adventure” in a “huge immersive ...
MMO
Most simply, difficulty is inversely proportional to the chance of success for a given action. When you try to do something that has a low chance of success and claim that it’s difficult to accomplish that task. But what if that task is rolling eleven thousand consecutive 6s on a 6-sided die? ...
MMO
Humans accomplish complex tasks through series of simple steps. Each of these steps can be easily put into one’s head and manipulated to project the results of decisions. Sometimes this is an entirely unconscious process, as it is when you’re fighting someone with a sword. Sometimes it involves ...
MMO
Let’s think about how society holds people accountable for their actions and why. We’re not going to be able to directly model this in a game, but understanding how morality and social structures maintain themselves in real life can provide us with a basis for the mechanical social structure in ...
MMO
thatsaterribleidea.com - 17 days ago
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thatsaterribleidea.com —
I’m sorry that I’m hopping on the bandwagon
to post about Dragon Age. This post will not...
be like others, though. Other bloggers have slobbered all over themselves as they’ve pointed out all the great features of DA:O. This post is heresy. Everyone ...
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Dragon Age: Heresy
Now that we’ve reached one hundred posts, it’s time to start moving forward with this blog as a website. I feel like TATI is past the point where being tagged a blogspot blog doesn’t matter. TATI has quadrupled in average traffic over the past month-and-a-half. I feel like we’re on the verge of ...
MMO
In tabletop games, it’s important to maintain the gap between the player and the player’s character. These games hinge on the players roleplaying—the conflict resolution mechanisms are a big aid in the process. The quality of a game of D&D often depends largely on if the players can ...
MMO
Perhaps my post about the abstraction of character progress was a bit premature. I defined the progress of characters without defining characters. This post will fill that gap. I aim to present vocabulary and set of patterns of defining and analyzing character abstractions as they exist in ...
MMO
Music is important to me. I’ve been playing drums for twelve years, though I only developed a significant interest in music 8 years ago (during my high school years). It’s easy to settle into a groove and only listen to a certain kind of music that you find comfortable. Most people have their ...
MMO
Any fan of strategy games should play through at least one campaign of AI War in their lifetime. James Murff puts it well in his review (which has recently been featured on the front page of AI War’s website): AI War is, quite simply, the best experience you could have with co-op or ...
MMO
thatsaterribleidea.blogspot.com - 26 days ago
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thatsaterribleidea.blogspot.com —
My post on the character progression has informed
my previous analysis on use-based skill gain. Using the...
tools I provided in that article, I’d like to re-examine use-based skill gain in more detail and draw some distinctions that I missed last week. ...
(more)
Use-based Skill Gain, Revisited
thatsaterribleidea.blogspot.com - 22 days ago
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thatsaterribleidea.blogspot.com —
I walked into a Subway sandwich store for
the first time earlier today. After ordering, I was...
confronted by a lot of options that weren’t presented in an efficient way. There were approximately four steps where I had to make some choice as to what to ...
(more)
Your Job is to Make Tasty Sandwiches!
thatsaterribleidea.blogspot.com - 23 days ago
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thatsaterribleidea.blogspot.com —
The first post I made here on That’s
a Terrible Idea documented the four core design elements...
of MMORPGs : conflict resolution, goal generation, power growth, and player interaction. In my 10 Points, I point out ways that each of these core elements ...
(more)
The Abstraction of Character Progress
