I''ve seen this a lot on MUD''s.

Often a hardcore gamer is someone who has played before, was booted or banned and tries again anonymously. He knows the tricks, which monsters to kill for max XP, which quests to do. His aim is to not bother with anything not related to leveling and to just gain as much money and XP as possible quickly.

Just make your game friendly, social. Allow parties, where you can take lower characters to give them XP. This will make the hardcore players help the beginners. Flag experience/playing time and kill the ones that level too fast.

the problem is that you are trying to balance two separately constructed spheres: survival and social standing. in the real world, interaction between these spheres is handled by differentiating the rules of survival for each individual and using a material system to decentralize social status (mostly). perhaps you could apply a similar principle by increasing the detail of the skill tree (eg sword skill with multiple subcategories) and equating rank with geographic familiarization only (eg lvl 10 for forested areas, lvl 2 for desert areas).

quote:Original post by Ironside
Because of this people tend to only play in groups when their friends are on, instead of forming impromptu groups with other members of their local (local within the game world) community.

This is only the tip of the iceberg on this topic... there are arguements for the gloabl chat capabality as well, but you can''t just call UO''s "Huge barrier" a lot of time was spent considering the chat in the game. You can see UO''s designer speak out on alot of these issues at his site

Well, there are ways to get some of the benefits of both (gamers able to form self determined communities and locality driven communities), that''s to simply have local chat also shown over the character''s head, just as in UO.

There is no reason for everything to go through the chat window exclusively and for the case of local chat (anything non-global), it makes more sense for it to be over the characters head also (in the chat window is also important, since you then have a log which you can reference to also), since then you don''t need to read the name (kind of like real life) and players will gain association of personalities to characters (as opposed to names) more freely. I think this would be even more effective in your 1st person MMORPGs than it is in the isometric ones. Players turn their heads to look and see who''s talking (a clever programmer would just make it where you could click on the text on the edge of the screen to turn and face the speaker).

Players are also less likely to ignore someone asking for help if they are running by and see the person''s plea for help... Text boxes are commonly so full of nonsense chat that players very commonly ignore it out of habit. You won''t ignore someone saying something because you know that it''s probably directed either at you or everyone.

Of course, I would say to keep global chat out of the UI simply because it''s kind of like making everyone say the words that they are typing into IRC or ICQ. You could technically have a button that overrides that to also make all global speech local also, but set the default to the opposite.