Hey, OP, I'll trade you some paragraph breaks for those question marks.

What does bubble chat have to do with WoW? It's not a themepark only feature. UO had it.

In fact, the current chat channels we have are too themeparky in design and not immersive enough. They are just IRC channels tacked onto the UI.

Adding some kind of chat command floating just above you your avatar makes the game more immersive because it ties your avatar into the world in a realistic way.

I honestly cannot understand why you don't want this

1. Dirk Daggering
2. Blackomen
3. Deolator

This has been said already, but the game does not have enough population yet, therefore more islands are not necessary.

In fact, adding islands now would be a bad thing, because all the people who want to pvp will be scattered across a larger area and won't run into each other as much. That means less pvp and thus more people finding the game disappointing.

You are looking at it the wrong way round.

I think as the playerbase increases the devs will gradually add more land (or so I hope).

This game is not aimed at the vast majority of players. From the things other posters have said, there is room for non-PvPers in this game, because there are protected areas where they can spend all their time if they so wish.

The games you mentioned in your OP did not fail because they were PvP games. First, has Aion failed? Please provide statistics showing whether or not it is making a profit for NCSoft. Second, Mortal Online is lacking subscribers for various reasons, none of which are due to the fact that it is an open pvp game.

Edit: Had to check the OP for the other games you mentioned. I never played Shadowbane so I'm not sure why that closed down in the end. As for Darkfall, it's still going. You can't call it a raging success, but it hasn't collapsed yet. And again, it had a lot of flawed mechanics that put people off it, particularly when many of them thought it was going to be the next UO and it wasn't even close.

Perpetuum rocks.

"Appropriate" length is different for everyone. What takes one player a week to learn might take another three months. Most western MMOs probably take the average new player anything from one to three months to progress to a point where they are competitive. In a really complex MMO you probably never stop learning. I hope Perpetuum will be like that, but to get to a competitive level will take a newb about 2 months ito EP, which is pretty fair.

You're taking what I said too far. All I meant by that point was that a mass zerg of newly created alts should not be effective in combat, because it gives corps an easy win button. Encouraging zergs via a game mechanic is a bad thing. I wasn't endorsing "main" characters per se, and I think the restrictions you suggest are completely unecessary. The way it is now works fine.

Because character advancement are methods of achieving greater wealth and power. And because a sandbox game is supposed to be a virtual society as much as a game, and should model the way things work in real life where we need to learn skills in order to perform roles.

Again, because a sandbox game is supposed to be a virtual society, and should model the way things work in real life. You have to work to get rewards, and when you've done that the reward is all the sweeter. Secondly, why do you assume all the activities I've named aren't fun? None of them are exciting, but they can all be fun in their own way. I actually enjoy putting up buy and sell trades on the market and trying to make a profit out of it. Out of all the things I named, I like killing mobs best so in order to get NIC that's what I do.

If I don't like the grinding options provided in a game, I won't play it. I don't like quests, so I'm not playing WoW. I don't enjoy killing wisents for gold, so that's one of the reasons I'm not playing Mortal Online. I do enjoy killing mobs in Perpetuum, and that's one of the reasons that prompted me to pre-order.

Look at single player games. Years of work by large teams go into a game that could last anything from 10 to 80 hours. People play MMOs for thousands of hours...it's unrealistic to expect similar content to be generated for all that time. Having said that, did you check out SWTOR? What do you make of that?

I do think more could be done to make content in MMOs interesting. For instance, PvE dungeons are almost always 1) See goup of stationary mobs 2) Tank pulls group 3) DPS dpses group 3) healer heals 4) Mobs die 5) Go round the corner and repeat with next group of mobs until you get to the boss. I think they should add more puzzles. Some MMOs do this, but after a while even that gets repetitive (e.g. DDO).

But to get back to my original point, in a virtual society not everything can be fun. The whole point of the game is to work for rewards, and you know you are playing the right game when you enjoy the work as well as the reward. That's what I mean about dressing up the grind to make it fun.

Um. No. Ganking and histrionics make the game interesting and exciting, it's the reason many of us play. Moreover, Perpetuum allows you to avoid this - you don't have to go out of the safe zones if you don't want to, any more than you do in EVE. You don't have to post in the corporation dialogue forums if you don't find that kind of thing interesting.

Why does a game need to succeed on a large scale? Why is that an aim? Most sandbox devs very sensibly aim small because they know their genre is a niche one. Prior to WoW, MMOs measured success in terms of hundreds of thousands of subs. Small developers can easily survive and make a profit on these subscriber numbers, so why on earth would they count it a failure just because they can't get millions of subs?

I'm trying to make the point that you can't call the sandbox genre broken because DF is broken. It's the other way around. DF is broken because it doesn't do the sandbox properly.

A stone age society does not imply brutal coercion by force. The simplest tribal societies have egalitarian structures with small group sizes, and if there is one person in charge he tends to lead by consensus and does not posses greater personal wealth than the rest. Many small guilds follow this structure. At the other end of the scale are larger guilds with more stratified hierarchies, where the leadership control and allocate most of the guild's resources. Guilds are microcosms of real world polities and it's funny to see how different nationalities consistently produce the same kinds of structures...like French guilds are so often organised along democratic lines, etc. The main differences between real life and virtual polities is that (a) individual members have a choice as to which guild they join and (b) they are smaller in size. This means that some things that work irl don't work in games and vice versa.

Sorry that was a bit of a digression there. But the point I'm trying to make is that all these little polities need to decide whether to co-operate or conflict with each other, it's like a giant game of prisoner's dilemma, and it involves trade, non-aggression pacts, treaties, alliances, hostilities and war. That's what I thought you meant by "stone age societies" and this is one of the main reasons people are drawn to a game like Perpetuum.

Like what...? I can think of some ways that in game organisations could model rl ones more accurately, but what's there works perfectly adequately for our purposes.

But "hitting each other with rocks" is one of the main reasons we are here. The more the hitting better.

Um...it already is? There are already corps fighting each other out there in the beta islands. Those that don't want to just stay in alpha territory and peaceably build up wealth and mutual love or whatever it is they do with each other.

As mentioned above, a sandbox is a game that sets up a virtual society within a box. A society needs to be defined by the rules and restrictions that govern it. DF is a fantasy world, it should have bankers, traders, trade caravans, bandits and an economy. By choosing to make banking global, Adventurine wiped out any chance of any of these things happening.

There is no agreed definition of sandbox. Despite this I think your definition is wrong. More freedom does not equal sandbox. A sandbox has to have a set of rules that govern it, which either reflect or twist real life rules. A theme park restricts you in a very artificial way by giving you a specific path to follow e.g. you become an assassin by rolling a class with that name that uses daggers, not by joining a secret society and getting contracts to murder other characters.

A sandbox provides many different options which are limited by the rules and the mechanics of the game, in the same way that we are limited in a real life society. Local banking is one of those kinds of limits that enhances game play and creates reasons for players to interact with each other, thus making their gameplay experience more challenging, but also more meaningful.

The genre isn't broken. Niche, yes, broken, no. The main trouble is that companies who want profit will make themepark games. Sandbox games end up being made by indie devs who lack funding, or experience, or both, and the games they make tend to launch with bugs, memory leaks, client crashes and server instability. (Perpetuum is doing amazingly well here).

Open world pvp doesn't equal sandbox, nor does it have to. All those EVE players living in high sec are still playing a sandbox game, albeit most of their combat is PvE. I can't attribute this fact, but I once saw a statistic that null sec space hosts about 50,000 of EVE's players. That's a pretty respectable proportion if it's true.

Darkfall is (arguably) not a true sandbox* it's just (or was at launch) an open world PvP game and therefore does not support your argument that the genre is broken because open world PvP is broken.

There are two mechanics which do this in games in general. The first mechanic is the carrot, which lures people into PvP zones in the first place. The second mechanic is the lack of either the will or the ability to disengage.

The carrot can't just be mobs that drop better stuff, or better mining yields. It has to be something that players want, and that they will be forced to protect otherwise they risk losing. Such as owned outposts or player structures - which also serve as the second mechanic, because they have to be captured and defended.

I can't really talk about how successfully Perpetuum has done this, because I haven't played long enough to know. The ingredients are there (or in the case of player built structures are in the pipeline).

You can't really prevent people from avoiding engagements they think they won't win. It's human nature, and game mechanics need to work with human nature, not against it.

P.S. Sorry Neoxx for not trolling in your stEVE thread

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*By "sandbox" I mean a game that tries to simulate a world where players take on social, economic and military roles via their interactions with each other, where the content is largely produced by the players themselves using the tools at their disposal.

Every time I see this argument I say we need more games in the style of EVE. And then I ask people if they would rather have more WoW clones?

And they say "yeah, good point."

P.S. Neoxx you looked better with more weight on. Eat cake! Diets are overrated.

Yeah, agree, we lack a screenshots/videos/fan art section