I think Dark Age of Camelot is going to be one of the best games of the year. I love the Idea. I would just like to get some opinions of the game devs out there. What do you think of it and Would you like to make a game like that??

DAoC.... my EQ guild moved to DAoC beta to try to own the server of choice ASAP (heh, uber powergaming). Worst(yet still best) thing about these games are the time consumption. Simply kills "programming time" so to speak. I had to relearn C++ several times as I made leaps from UO->EQ and back multiple times over last few years, since thinking I could play AND find time to code doesn''t work (till I halted, I played EQ 16-18 hours a day most of the time staring at a wall waiting on others). Guess this isn''t quite the answer you may have been asking for though.

From a dev view, it''s a different type of commitement to make a persistant world. Rather then making the game and getting to move on (ignoring fixes and addons), you get to work with the same game which can be good or bad. It would appear different issues become a problem too, someone making a trainer for a 1player game isn''t much to worry about, but ANYTHING that wasn''t intended by the design to give an advantage to someone over someone else is an exploit and HAS to be corrected or the problems stack up. When dealing with MMORPG''s, there is NO room for cheating (bugs needing fixes, hackers making programs manipulating data, or serious badasses that attack the server itself). Also, players griefing (someone getting enjoyment out of ruining someone elses experience, or with that intent) is not good either.

I can see advantages though, like being able to keep track of every user so there is less chances for pirating. But there is still potential for emulator servers, but often a computer may not be powerful enough to run a server like this at full efficiency, and it''s not as common. How often do you hear complaints about jerks pirating Everquest and Ultima Online? Heh, I dont hear very many. Both (and many others popping up) generally depend on player interaction that you will only get from the real server, which the pirating community can''t provide very well.

I''m rambling, I''ll shut up

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