Back in my post on Rubber band systems I touched on the disconnect that a player feels when they are told by an NPC that they are special and that the fate of the world rests on their shoulders. The disconnect arises when the player realizes that every other player is being told the same lie and that nothing really hinges on their actions. There are a couple points here. First, it is not really true that player actions make no difference. One member can make the difference between a successful and an unsccessful raid. One vibrant member can be the heart and soul of a guild. Second, this disconnect is caused by the same design philosophy that causes 'quests' and a linear progression through the map. Causing players to chase the main story line, and incidentally causing congestion of same level players in certain areas. This also causes people to leave the game! If the interest in the game, the driving force, the thing that causes players to move from one place to another, is a line, then once they reach the end of that line, they leave. This causes companies to have to put out expansion after expansion with 'endgame raid content' and increased level caps to keep the experienced players' interests. The flawed design philosophy is, in short, building a single player game and tacking on player to player interaction. The really screwy part of this is that MMOs did not start out this way. In the early days of MUDs, there were no main story lines. Very few of these had any 'quests' at all. This disease was picked up (as far as I can tell) in Everquest, and MMOs have been sick ever since.
Now, let it never be said that I am merely a complainer. I would not bring this up unless there were some reasonably workable solution. First, scrap the main storyline. This frees up a lot of time and energy on the part of the design and writing team. Part of this effort should be put into building RBS. Another part put into quests that are sent via mail to players who spend prestige at a tavern to request work. A delay of a day (realtime) or so before a sidequest is sent to the player serves two functions. First, this gives players a sort of manditory downtime. This encourages the player to look around for things to do in the world instead of merely chasing a line. Second, this gives GMs an entrance to slip into an NPC and play with a player in a quest of the GMs making. Even a hundred GMs cannot guide tens of thousands of player experiences, but a score or so, playing through two quests per shift, will reach over 43 thousand players during the course of a year. Enough that everybody will have heard of somebody that has adventured with a GM. Third, quests should be made that are not merely contingent on the state of the player, but the state of the RBS in the world, and these should for the most part serve to push these RBS out of their ground state. In this way, these quests will make a difference to the state of the world and will be more than meaningless exercises.
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