Roleplaying games

I recently tried one of those new free MMORPG, “Tales of Pirates”, and was both fun and at same time disappointing to see that there was still the “camping” present since the first days of Everquest…

For those who don’t know what it is, is quite simple: in a certain location spawns a powerful (or even not powerful) monster, that once killed or performed a task, gives you a very powerful item who everyone wants. So, there are thousands of players on server but the world is one: what happens? that people sits nearby the spawn point and try to kill it as soon as it appears!

In many MMORPG the first party that does damage to it gets the loot, or recently in a better way the party that does more damage to it gets the loot. But is really fun to see groups of people battling over it, trying to get the reward

I just asked myself from a gamedesign point of view if is a cool thing or not: it sucks because people with lot of time can always get the loot, while the more “casual” players will almost never be able to get it (if is really so powerful and sought). On the other hand, this solves the problem of having too many people getting powerful quickly. I remember in Dark Age of Camelot that when you kill a named NPC all players in the party gets a powerful item. I don’t think that this is really the solution, to give all the party members a reward for killing it - makes the game progression too fast IMHO.

Anyway talking about that MMORPG in particular, seems quite nice. It’s free, but is one of those “use real cash to buy items inside the game”… so as always you’ll see people that spent lot of money on it leveling to lvl 60 in a few days thanks to the uber powerful items they bought… I have yet to understand if in the end you pay more that way than with a regular subscription!