On the plus side, the source code is available, so if a programmer DOES step forward, it should be relatively straightforward to get to work. :)

cool, where is it?

http://mylittleforum.net/download

These are all really cool ideas - but somewhat beyond the scope of management at the moment. This is an off-the-shelf forum; so far, I'm just turning on/turning off options, and tweaking settings. What you're asking for is actual recoding. That's not going to happen any time soon, unless someone steps up and offers to do the work. (Nobody has, so far.)

On the plus side, the source code is available, so if a programmer DOES step forward, it should be relatively straightforward to get to work. :)

cool, where is it?

It's based on facts, not my worldview. Certain business models encourage the games to be bad, and some actually REQUIRE them to be bad. I've never seen this explored or explained, so maybe I should at some point.

As always, I would be fascinated by your explanation.

Pay to Play

Example: any arcade game.

Business model encourages good games. Players directly pay for playtime, and if it's not good they won't play. The game has to be fun immediately, and throughout. Making unfair games that kill the player randomly in an effort to extract more coin get labeled quarter suckers and are avoided. The better your game, the more people want to play it and the more money you make.

Pay to Own

Example: most console or PC games.

Business model encourages good games. Players put down a lot of money, and so expect quality. If the game is bad, word of mouth diminishes sales, and developer's subsequent games suffer. The better your game, the more people want it and the more money you make.

Ad supported

Example: beats me I don't know any because they suck

Requires games to be worse than they could be. Nobody like ads interrupting their playtime, and all other things being equal, a game without ads is superior to one with ads. So developers choose to make their game worse than they could to make money.

Freeware

Example: Nethack

There is no business model, so it does not affect game quality.

Subscription:

Example: World of Warcraft (formerly)

In theory encourages good games, since if the game isn't fun then players will stop playing and cancel their subscription, but in reality it encourages bad games that string the player along, stretching everything out in order to lengthen the amount of time a player plays, and thus increase his subscription revenue.

Micro transactions for items not available in game

Example: League of Legends.

Encourages the base game everybody gets to be worse than the optimal game if you pay for everything. Consider that whatever is available for purchase must make the game better or more interesting, or else there would be no incentive to buy it. This means, developers intentionally leave out the interesting parts of their games and hide them behind a paywall. This means the version of the game you first play is necessarily worse than a version of the game with all the additional stuff. The stuff could very well be included, since it's available for purchase right away. This is the developer compromising their base game for the sake of money, which is selling out by any reasonable definition.

Micro transactions for stuff available in game

Example: Crimson (from your pals at Certain Affinity), Farmville

The worst business model, which actually REQUIRES games to be bad. If items that can be purchased can also be obtained by playing (gold in the case of Crimson), then what players are doing when they buy stuff is paying to NOT PLAY the game. This should sound strange, because it is. The only reason someone would pay to not play a game, is if paying to not play is somehow more pleasant than actually playing. This therefore, REQUIRES elements of the game to be unpleasant, i.e. bad, or else players would just have fun playing the game and think it insane to pay not to play. Gold in crimson steam pirates requires grinding and killing monsters. Items and action points in sims social require tons of time to obtain. Games of this type need to be purposely bad, and this is not only selling out, but morally unacceptable since you are purposely wasting people's time.

Adam Sessler talks about information told to him by Activision's CEO on Destiny's cost.

This either means:

1. Simply buying the content is enough to support such a game, and MMOs like WOW have been charging you a subscription fee for nothing.

I'm going to guess that WoW's infrastructure has higher requirements than Destiny's, as a start.

In addition... yes. WoW makes considerably more margin than non subscription games. There are other challenges-- ongoing support, service availability, and churn, but if these are properly managed, recurring revenue always trumps one-time revenue.

Time WoW players spend playing just ensures they will keep playing, and thus keep paying.

Time WoW players spend not playing is free money.

Eve's infrastructure probably costs more per player than WoW's because of their single shard architecture and lower player base, but they've still managed to be stable over time where plenty other wanna-be WoW killers bite the dust.

I have a question about this shared world idea.

Is it going to be akin to the Fable series where your character can ask to join somebody else's world and then toodle about for a bit, earning mana/gold/leprechauns until they bugger off back to their own dimension? That isn't very new, but is more like what we see on consoles.

Or will the world persist when I am not in it? This is much more novel for a console games, although MMOs and text-based roleplaying games have been doing it for year. If the world does persist when I am not in it, what does this mean for the story I am following? No chapter can truly have that much impact on the world and that doesn't seem to me to be the sort of thing that would be worth of the name Destiny.

What is my world and how do I share it?

I have a feeling it may be a little of both.

Probably each chapter has some seminal encounters or events that every player can and should experience. These will probably wait for you-- they'll still be around if you don't do them right when they're available, and who knows, maybe you can play through them more than once.

There might be other things, though, that go on without you and that affect the persistent world-- arena areas where players battle it out, and perhaps other areas where territorial struggles go on between factions.

I'm hoping they find a balance that works. The only thing I can end up thinking of are WoW boss encounters, where you put the Big Bad in the ground on Tuesday only for him to resurrect for the next bunch of players to kill on Thursday.

Has to be a way to do this and make it seem organic and emergent without making the events seem insignificant and canned.

Is it going to be akin to the Fable series where your character can ask to join somebody else's world and then toodle about for a bit, earning mana/gold/leprechauns until they bugger off back to their own dimension? That isn't very new, but is more like what we see on consoles.

Or will the world persist when I am not in it? This is much more novel for a console games, although MMOs and text-based roleplaying games have been doing it for year. If the world does persist when I am not in it, what does this mean for the story I am following? No chapter can truly have that much impact on the world and that doesn't seem to me to be the sort of thing that would be worth of the name Destiny.

What is my world and how do I share it?

The fact that Destiny is not subscription based actually worries me greatly. What is their business model going to be? How will they pay for this always connected world? Old style buy the $60 game and play the entire game forever? (although even that will not be a possibility since without the servers you can't play the game, and they won't be around forever) Or will we be treated to micro transactions for gear and stuff?

As Claude pointed out, no micro transactions. Good call, says I.

I think we may need more information on what Destiny's network model is, rather than its business model.

They've said it's not an MMO, so I don't think there is going to be a single, unified, persistent world that tracks everything, for everyone, everywhere, like Eve Online does. Probably not even shard servers that do the same for WoW on a smaller scale.

Perhaps the lobby will be replaced by an instanced areas that members of a faction have access to. Gameplay areas would be instanced and handled entirely on the console, but at certain predetermined intervals it might be possible for players part of the same faction, or party, or from your friends list, to share the same instance-- like drop-in drop-out coop the way Journey does it.

The shared universe persistence could come from saving some of the results of those instanced encounters to a meta world shared by everyone, sort of the way multiplayer results in Mass Effect 3 impact the "readiness level" in the single player campaign.

I'm not sure they're going to need big iron the way Eve does to track what is going on in your Destiny world; probably the competitive/cooperative multiplayer action will be handled by XBL matchmaking and the equivalent on PSN, and Bungie.net will handle the metaworld stuff. Certainly Bungie tracked lots of information and content about the Halo games that went way above and beyond simple matchmaking, and nearly all of that was free except for the extra space and features that were part of Bungie Pro.

Color me cautiously optimistic.

I notice nobody's said the word "episodic" yet although there were mobile notifications about Chapters. Perhaps Destiny will do what Valve sort of hinted at they'd do with Half-Life, and sort of what 343 is doing with H4's Spartan Ops-- chapters that will spread out the single player campaign over a certain period of time, with periodic big drops of new content-- the Comet DLC packs.

But yes, the new method isn't broken, since we were only doing that because we had no other recourse. Now we do. And a pretty nifty one at that, too. :)

This either means:

1. Simply buying the content is enough to support such a game, and MMOs like WOW have been charging you a subscription fee for nothing.

I'm not sure how you've managed to conclude this given how little is yet known about Destiny's mechanics for ongoing player participation. WoW is built around a platform that is not only constantly evolving from a gameplay mechanics perspective, but is also continually being augmented with new content. Every two years they deliver a new expansion which adds a lot of new content and mechanics, but these things are also added to the game gradually. It's possible Bungie intend to do this too, but we've no basis for drawing that conclusion yet.

On the plus side, the source code is available, so if a programmer DOES step forward, it should be relatively straightforward to get to work. :)

I setup a very small LAMP database about 7 years ago at work. I'm not a web guy (C/C++ programmer). I was asked to do it because the database was my idea. "Your idea smart Alec: you do it!"

I'm also busy with work right now, but...

If nobody else steps up then I could have a look at it whenever work permits.

Have you considered using VirtualBox? It runs on: Windows, Linux, and Macs. If you setup a LAMP mini-forum running on the local machine... then you should be able to export the state of the machine and then devs could import it on their machines and would have a working, already setup, test system to develop on.

Once they get their changes working they could export their changes and you could load it on your own machine to try it out.

My email address is enabled on my profile.

Adam Sessler talks about information told to him by Activision's CEO on Destiny's cost.

This either means:

1. Simply buying the content is enough to support such a game, and MMOs like WOW have been charging you a subscription fee for nothing.

2. Bungie has some other way to make money which I can't yet imagine. They wouldn't be stupid enough to place ads in the game, so if it's not ads, and it's not micro transactions, I'm at a loss to imagine what it would be.

Nah, I know.
I was just testing to see how far the auto-NM would go, if it would cover the previous NM method. As I suspected, it didn't, for the same reason the method worked in the first place.

And then made fun of it. :P

The reason the previous method worked is because webBBS strips out all HTML coding in replies - this forum doesn't.

Neither one is 'broken', or more or less functional, really - they just work differently.

And then made fun of it. :P

As always, I would be fascinated by your explanation.

Check back here tomorrow then. I need time to write it up.