I have nothing against World of Warcraft, but the Gamasutra editorial World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things highlights one problem I have with the entire MMORPG* genre:
I couldnāt agree more. And thereās a quote from www.bash.org that always strikes me as awfully accurate, and you have reminded me of it with that last line. It goes like this: āIRC: Multiplayer notepadā. =)
By the way, Iām a fellow BF2 playerā¦
MMORPGs: The genre for union shops and state employees! 
Wow. Iāve long drawn the analogy between playing most RTS and āadjusting a slider in Excel faster than the other guyā, but Progress Quest looks fantastic.
I must organize my sweatshop to go play it for a while.
I think Iām an effective programmer, but Iāve never been sure.
Iām pretty sure the ineffective developers arenāt thinking about this, so youāre in the clear.
Introspection is where itās at.
And just to show Iām not singling out the WoW players in the crowd, here are my stats in Battlefield 2ā¦
http://bf2s.com/player/wumpus/
ā¦ which I spend FAR too much time playing.
Then why playing WoW on private servers with 1min to level 70 all gear avaible is so boring? I think the essence of a game is to have fun, and time played != fun != skill. Everybody likes the thrill that MMORPGS gives you when you get that uber hard to get piece of equipment.
@hoffmann Yeah but I think that the only reason that the item is worth so much is because of that time you put in. I think that Jeff is pointing out that people do place value in the wrong areas. The fact that WoW becomes boring if you can be lvl 70 with all gear proves that Jeff is right. WOW really is a boring game made into something valuable by the TIME placed into it, not the skill. If we took say Halo for example, everybodies character is on an equal playing field and no effort is required to become a āSpartanā therefore a players (or a teams) success is directly proportional to their skill and no matter how much they play the game, no matter if they finish it all and get everything, it will still be fun to play again because the skill is what counts.
Yes, but the trick is knowing which developer you are. Effective or less-effective. How can you tell? Iāve thought long and hard about it and havenāt quite come up with an answer. I think Iām an effective programmer, but Iāve never been sure.
Very relevant essay from 2009
Oh, BF2ā¦
By the way, just some days ago I discovered that it used a lot of Python.
