Sorry, but I'm still on the fence.

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Tuesday, February 19, 2013, 19:02 (4294 days ago) @ Cody Miller

As for the rest... loot drops, crafting, and mandatory timed events that you can miss out on or will change your game world while you're not playing (Cody mentioned those)... have any of those things actually been in any way confirmed? Or are we just making stuff up?

Well, by definition a persistent world exists and changes when you aren't in it. So that means yes, you will miss stuff unless you play 24/7.

I think that's one possible interpretation of what "persistent" means. Yes, it means it exists when you aren't in it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that things change with respect to your play when you aren't around.

Persistence could be something as simple as meaning that enemies don't respawn, and that items stay where you've left them-- the world doesn't reset itself when you leave. This is not an issue in a single-player campaign, because you just save the game world when you shut down, and nothing can change. In a multiplayer world, it's on even when no one is playing.

BUT... that does not mean the game must allow for things that will change your experience while you aren't around.

If the game has Guilds, and there's a Guild House where people meet up before going to play, and half the members are on one side of the world, and half are on the other, so that by going to sleep you're "missing" half of the play-- is this a problem for you? Or is this a feature?

If a player isn't around when his guild goes on an end-game raid, do you consider that he's "missed" it? Isn't that opportunity just going to come around again?

I tend to think these sort of essential experiences will be instanced-- when a new "chapter" drops people will be able to team up and go tackle it any time after it's ready. I don't think you should consider that you "missed" it just because somebody else played it before you while you were doing something else. I don't think it's going to go away because other people played it. And there will probably be other kinds of play to engage in that can be done anytime-- firefight-style coop, deathmatch-style competitive matches, that sort of thing.

This forum is online and persistent, but the new threads that are posted while I'm sleeping-- which is most of them-- are still around for me to read and respond to when I wake up.