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I Miss the Throw of the Dice
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Posted by: laborat
(Things you can consider while I see how my dungeon and dragons handbooks are doing on Ebay)
the "Is that all there is to online gaming syndrome" like flu season seems to come and go with or without a vaccine to cover it properly. A recent assessment of how games are clonish of popular games by a poster in one of the OTS forums is unfortunately accurate. Like most of the gaming companys these days, their catalogs of games are for the most part, market driven -- i.e. if it works ( a game concept) do something similar (clone it) and hope marketing can come up with a unique angle.
I have been bored with online gaming for a while now. The thrill is gone. How many times can one build up a character or concoct a winning strategy without realizing that the efforts are not worth the time spent to achieve ones goals. The best online games cost you money on a monthly basis and you don’t get much for that money but harassment by old players or waylaid by some 12 year old idiot with guild backing that rips you off and then runs to big bad 100th level guild enforcer if you decide to retaliate.
It also rankles the Rat's Ass that so many gamers insist on finding ways to circumvent the rules of gaming to be able to say they are better than anyone else who games. The Cheats, Exploits, Hacks, and Proggies used to better oneself in a game have always seemed to me to offer more harm than good to the gamers who use them. Certainly it was a topic in Blizz OTS for a long while how exploits were messing with peoples system registries but that didn‘t seem to stop gamers from trying it anyway.
Another factor in my backing off of the online gaming experience is, well personal -- I missed face to face contact. Like the old D&D games. pencils and papers and books of spells. It was the company of friends that made those games successful. A group of friends against a Dungeon Master intent on wiping us all out. You don't see a lot of that online anymore. It's all guild oriented. Might as well call guilds, Frat houses, since it has become not who you are, but what guild you are in that is status now. Once it was online friends you met and played with, but to be honest my feeling is that it is all geared toward winning at any cost now, not bonding with new online friends.
(Let me leave LAN partys out of this, since they still offer the best spirit of the gaming brotherhood I have ever seen.)
So as far as online gaming goes, the industry needs to recognize that they cannot rest upon past successes. Someone needs to put the human experience back into gaming. I am tired of coming upon an orc villiage and havocing my way through the whole tribe with my plus two dagger of infinite orc piercing. There needs to be more levels of uncertainty in gaming situations. It takes all the fun out of it when you know what to do in a situation EVERY time you encounter it. But that is what has happened. We all build a book on what to do with what and where and why. I also advocate random maps each time but try selling that to the lawyers and accountants who run the gaming Biz.
As it is, well…online gaming has become too impersonal, almost mechanical in the rote responses to areas of games, situations, and how to deal with monsters. I say rote since we all have found we have to die and die again and again to be able to become good enough to get to that next level or that next mob -- so much so that the element of fun is often cast aside in lieu of darker motives like ruining the game for someone else or (insert favorite gaming peeve here)
Until they bring back the human element (unpredictability) and the unhackable sense of real adventure to online gaming, I will still be taking the occasional run in my Mech, with my strike team, my dungeon group, my pit crew, though my heart will not be really in it...for the most part I am sure I will be bored with it all and wondering if I should just take my sweetie out to hear live music tonight instead of nodding off in some online guild board meeting.
Posted by: chaosisreality
This is great Laborat, but you are missing 2 points.
There are two distinctive types of Online Gaming, MMORPG's (or any other MMO) and basic Multiplayer gaming. As you described, most MMO games are a pain because people who have been there longer feel superior. Companies in the industry have also seen this, and some steps to remedy it can already be seen in games (Taking GunBound for an example, the zones are divided into the classes of Newb [Beginner] and Newb free [Metal Axe and higher, I believe].)
Multiplayer Online games are worlds better. If you know the controls, and are skilled enough then people will accept that, and them.
Cheats? Usually only the people that AREN'T skilled enough to be able to play on there own use them, and they are pretty easy to sniff out. But I do know some people that use cheats for fun, IE editting the file so every guy rusing him looks like a tall christmas elf. 
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