The rest of the game I have to talk about are all ones I spent at least a month playing, so it will probably take me several paragraphs to talk about each one.

A Tale In the Desert - First of all let me make the disclaimer that my comments do not apply to the current version of the game, although it usually doesn't change much between annual server restarts. Anyway. This MMO is fairly unique in that it does not have combat. It also for the most part does not have NPCs, although it has a few temples and schools that act as quest obtaining and quest turn-in points. It does have a bit of a quest sequence which is internal to each character - basically a list of what must be done to reach the next level of "citizenship", with the highest levels being Pharaoh and/or godhood. But the vast majority of the gameplay is gathering and crafting to climb a tech tree. You start out as basically an ignorant pre-historic human with nothing but what you can pick up off the ground and the gift of a couple of flax seeds. With mud and grass you make bricks, with wood and slate you build yourself a plane and make planks, with bricks and planks you make a house and a treasure chest and a kiln, with the flax you make twine and cloth, onward and upward, branching out into livestock and metallurgy until you are a one-person iron-age culture or even more advanced than that. A Tale in the Desert is one of the most successful instances I have encountered where a basically storyless game didn't feel too empty because it had me imagining my own little stories about my character and surroundings.

So why did I not play this game very long? Well, for one thing I like combat; it's exciting, and there just isn't any kind of challenging and adrenaline-pumping activity in the game to take its place. For a second thing the game world is way too big for the number of people playing in it, I rarely ran into other players in person. For a third thing it has no money system and worse no automatic world-wide bartering system. For a fourth thing the game has a pollution system where one player can get unknowingly screwed over by something another player did weeks ago, and the harmed player can't do anything to repair the situation. But the real deal-breaker for me was the mandatory group play. I'll probably rant about this in several of my comments on different games. I am a solo player; I like having other players around to talk to and trade with, but I don't want to be forced to spend an hour or more at a time being part of a group tackling some complicated task. That takes more planning, commitment, and socialization than I am up for. Finding out that one of the basic second-level building materials of the game could ONLY be gathered by a group just ruined for me the pleasure of being a one-person civilization. And it just further sealed the issue when I found out that marriage was a required quest for a higher level (IIRC it even had to be a heterosexual marriage, heteronormativity and gender stereotyping are another thing I'll rant about later.).

Beyond all that there were a few things about the game that could have used improving. The cooking system, as well as the activity of trying to make charcoal, were both pretty terrible. Actually they had some of the same problems as Ryzom's super-flexible crafting system - the player could try a thousand things, most would fail, there would be no feedback on what to do to succeed next time, and the only way to get anywhere would be to resort to the really annoying practice of taking notes on paper and doing a thousand rather boring experiments, which would take weeks to gather enough supplies to carry out. A Tale In The Desert also would have benefited from the ability to craft things to customize the character's appearances, as well as more customization for houses and the land around one's house. Mounts would have been really nice too, especially considering the fact that the world map would have taken most of a day (real time) to walk across. But the real answer to that would have been to make the game world modular, and only open one module at a time to dump all the new players into when existing areas were full. That would also have ensured there was a source of every resource in each sub-area, instead of some rare resources being present at only 3 places on the whole map.

Allow the reselection of skills/attributes/classes/etc, but require the player must re-play to earn these aspects. Don't let anything be free. Don't just throw and in-game currency fee on it. Make it earned through play outside of money farming.

Personally I strongly disagree with this. It's my preference to be able to do all the activities within a game with a single character, rather than creating a new one. If I've played my way to level 50, I feel I deserve the freedom to experiment with all possible builds that can be done by a level 50 player. I'm offended by games that make it impossible to respec or painfully costly in terms of money or effort. I don't at all agree with the argument that this is realistic - the average person these days has at least three careers in their lifetime, and they don't forget one to learn a new one either. However, that's my personal opinion, as the type of player that I am. Other types of players may very well prefer a system which encourages them to make several characters or restart a character. *shrug*

@sunandshadow - I'll check out Dofus, it looks interesting.

Skill based and point based systems are by no means perfect. Most of them suffer from exactly what you describe. In AC, while you have a vast array of skills and stats to put points into, you still need to decide what type of character you want. If you want an offensive mage, for example - there was that certain path you needed to go down with your experience and points and if you didn't your character would be much less powerful than another offensive mage at the same level who did follow that path. In AC, if you didn't set your initial stat points properly, your character was forever gimped. I've never tried to think of a good solution for that issue in that type of system. The community of the game always come up with that most efficient path for a given class.

That is a whole separate design discussion though - off the postmortem topic.

Eh, I'd rather have some off-topic posts scattered through the thread than stifle discussion. I thought I'd mention a few other problems with stats and character-building that I've seen. Of anything an MMO can do, one that seems to induce the most sheer rage and feelings of somewhat justifiable betrayal in a player is if an update to the game nerfs a build or class. If a player has spent three months or more building a high-level character, having the game change out from under him to invalidate all his work... that's bad news all around. A related problem is that it's not only difficult to balance each build against each other, there's usually an additional factor that they need to be balanced in both PvP and PvE situations, both solo and dungeon party situations, in leveling speed and money earning capacity, and at many different levels. I've played several games where there were one or two classes in constant shortage because they were mandatory for any dungeon run (generally healers and tanks), and one or two classes that were pariahs because they couldn't pull their weight in a dungeon, usually due to being halfway between a tank and a dps (pet users, paladins/druids). In one situation the class that was unwanted in dungeons for being weak in that situation was the SAME class that ruled 1v1 PvP and had the ability to level and earn money the fastest in solo play. Can't fix that with any simple buff or nerf. It might even be some sort of general truth of the universe that specialists classes are weak solo and generalist classes are weak in groups. And it would also be quite difficult to fix a situation where dungeons were built for a different mix of characters than players were making. A 5-man dungeon party is typically 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3 dps. But if only 1 in 10 characters created is a healer there's going to be a perpetual shortage of healers and difficulty doing dungeon runs.

I find feedback and impression of designers irrelevant. We all are old geezers who played all the games and are bored of them already. We have seen everything and tried everything. We strive only for originality, not for gameplay and fun. Designers are completely unlike normal player and have not much in common

It's like asking critics for opinion of the new movie. The real viewers have different tastes than critics, so favourable impression of critics might even be a death kiss for a movie.

It all depends on the game. There are plenty of games where changing around is suitable and even partially necessary, but that is not a game I would design or play. Freedom of choice is key to MMORPGs, outside of certain Theme Parks, and we should aim to retain player choice. If you train a skill, say the use of a Shield, so that you are a master wielding a shield. Awesome. Now you want to do something else? Set it to lower while you set your new skill to raise, similar to Ultima Online, and then go through the process of retraining. This is best used, in my mind so far, for a game where attaining maximum character level is rather casual, but developing your character and the skills it possesses are what takes a little extra time. The system would provide you the option to play the entirety of a game on just one character, but it requires time involved in training in order to try out everything.

That is one of the things I loved about Ultima Online. You had 700 skill points to distribute however you wanted. There were the classic builds - like a tank mage or sword melee but you could also make hybrids and get creative and your character would still be effective against others who used those classic builds. The more you used a skill the more it raised and you could lock or lower skills as well. If you had a fully built tank mage and you really wanted to, you could turn that character into an ingot mining blacksmith. And hey, if you still had your magery skills high enough you might have a nice surprise for a PK who tried to kill you for your ingots. The argument could be made that the classic builds were the most effective and that may be correct - but there was still 700 skill points and your character could take up and work any skill they wanted with those 700 points and if you wanted to change your character around you could slowly do so without deleting and re-creating. You still had multiple character slots so you could get creative with your account - but there was no pick a class or race at the beginning and get locked into a certain style of play. 700 skill points. Have fun.

Note that I do use past tense because I haven't played UO in probably 10 years. I have no idea what it is like now, but I know it isn't like it was.

Bottom line for me is this: While I've played WoW extensively, I've always put it down (along with all of the clones) because spending 10 hours getting a level, seeing no reward or advancement in between, and just getting a new spell at the end of that 10 hours just doesn't do it for me. Aside from the few extra HP points and mana, I just don't feel like my character is going anywhere. Just quest after quest of the same stuff. It gets mind numbing. Granted, a lot of people love mind numbing. They did ALOT better imo with the expansions. Quests are more fun and have variety, the gear you get during those quests does give you some feel of advancement - but still, eventually, I get bored and wonder why I wasn't programming or working on learning something in that time.

Now Eve - that seems like a great idea to me. Level skills and stats in real time while you are not logged in? Brilliant. Problem is, from what I saw in the limited time I played, Eve is not very newbie friendly and of course when anyone first starts playing they are exactly that. I really didn't have much of a clue and the tutorials and some of the missions were fine but I still found myself thinking, "Ok. Now what?" Or wondering if what I'm doing is actually correct or advancing my character.