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Old 04-22-2002, 04:31 PM   #1
Alexander Tau
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Hail!

I first posted about this potential new group in the general announcements forum. But
feedback from a few people has convinced me that if I really want to reach you I have
to go direct.

The Basic information :

The structure document:


Here is the post that initially announced the idea:


If formed this group will bring together everyone who works on any sort of
online multiplayer game. A huge environment of creators who can share
ideas and make them available to everyone. I announced it on the BioWare
NeverWinter Nights board because I believe that is the center of the next
explosion in games, specifically online multiplayer games.

But no matter how big NWN and all the games that flow from it are, it is still
only one part of what the GDG can be about.

So take a look at the Charter, and tell me what you think. This is the most
advanced Mud concept I have ever come up with, and the people here, all
of you, are the sort I see as the reason the GDG could become something
wonderful.

Christopher Darque
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'Alexander Tau'
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Old 04-24-2002, 05:35 AM   #2
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We have set up a site to use to organize the GDG. It has both a public
and private side so feel free to visit and take a look. It is 1 day old as I
am posting this so it will be a bit before it is really complete.

A.T
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Old 04-25-2002, 07:41 AM   #3
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geocites sucks, i would never go on a geocitie site....
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Old 04-25-2002, 07:12 PM   #4
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Well then you will be avoiding one of the largest collections of personal
Web Pages on the planet, but to each his own.
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Old 04-30-2002, 10:06 PM   #5
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Exclamation

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Old 04-30-2002, 10:24 PM   #6
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Idle question - Do you have anyone that is actually fairly well-known in this 'GDG'?

-D
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Old 04-30-2002, 10:48 PM   #7
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I suppose it depends on what you mean, does someone who have been
running a successful Mud for 5+ years count? Many of the current members
would qualify if that is the case. I guess it is obvious you do not know me,
and I have been making games for 20 years.

But the short answer is not really. I am making contact with the people
who run the major sites, but as you can imagine most get requests all
the time to join this or that group. This is the very beginning of this group,
so we are really focused on getting talented, experienced people together.

I must say I am gratified at the number of Moderators, Admin, and Site
Owners who have respondly positivly to the emails, and at how many have
dropped in to take a look. I really do understand how busy most are.

A.T
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Old 04-30-2002, 11:16 PM   #8
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Well, I think the only "explosion" and "flow" that NWN will generate are a bunch of crappy mods from UBER L33T twinks who think a +25 Vorpal Sword of Shooting Fireballs out of my Ass is cool.

There is a reason why professional game designers get paid for what they do.

I am sure there will be a handful of NWN mods that are truly excellent- perhaps better than the single player game that comes with NWN itself. But to think it will be the source of some massive "explosion" of multiplayer gaming is extremely naive. It also points to a lack of understanding of online gaming, and gaming in general.

Now, since I do intend to buy and play NWN, I will be pleasantly surprised if I am wrong here. But every other game released in hopes that the community would build for it has failed (for example, Vampire: The Masquerade). What you end up with are projects in varying degrees of incompetion and varying degrees of poor quality.
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Old 04-30-2002, 11:20 PM   #9
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Ditto Aristotle's post.

As for the rest - 20+ years? You'll have to pardon my skepticism then. But, I'm going to state it anyway, 'I believe you are as full of it as Xanferious'.

-D
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Old 04-30-2002, 11:33 PM   #10
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What exactly is your motivation for the flaming? A re-read of the entire thread hasn't pointed me to any particular reason, and all I see him trying to do is get a group together to talk about MUDs. Just curious.

Lot
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Old 04-30-2002, 11:38 PM   #11
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I realize you have no way to know this, but my experience and years of
study of the game industry, along with the games I have helped to publish,
run, sell, and populate with pictures, says NWN is unique.

You could very well be right, but since few games have been produced
with the level of committment to the community, and open intentions
of design in all the years computer games have even existed, I think it
is has a good chance of being something great.

I am not a kid, I am not given to foolish predictions, and I have studied
the subject, I wonder if you really have. It is not a matter of some good
mods, it is 24/7 Persistant Worlds, it is real AD&D play as one, one, part
of it's design. Teams are going to be required, just like on a Mud.

Regardless, time will tell, and this thread is about the GDG, and that is
not tied to only one game. If it was I would not be here taking these
little shots in stride.


A.T
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Old 04-30-2002, 11:44 PM   #12
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Masterful dodge of my point, but I reiterate. 20+ years? *cough*Xanferious*cough*.

Now, is anyone such as Hans Henrik Starfeldt in this so-called 'GDG'? How about our more modern creators, such as KaVir? Or, hell, Koryon or Unifex even?

Well?

-shrug-

-D
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Old 05-01-2002, 04:04 AM   #13
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I accept the compliment, although I am a little confused by it,
quoting myself here:

'But the short answer is not really'

The simple truth is the Game Directors Guild is for the people who create
and run online multiplayer games. The Immortals, Wizards, Imps, and a
lot of other names.

While we will be pleased to have anyone who has made a contribution
we are focused on getting the people who are out there making the games
run. So we will never judge ourselves on how many 'celebs' we have but
rather how many people find the GDG to be a benefit.

For you perhaps this will make us unimportant, but I have a group of
people forming, and each one is as important to the GDG as any other.


A.T
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Old 05-01-2002, 06:25 AM   #14
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After "20+ years of making games" you have to resort to geo****ties for free web hosting? You can't afford $30 for a domain name and $5-20 a month for web hosting?

Honestly, I am not trying to attack or flame you, but surely you can see why people doubt the veracity of your claims.

As for Neverwinter Nights being unique: how? Vampire: The Masquerade, Dungeon Siege, and Morrowind all have extremely advanced ediors for building worlds. The editors for the last two contain the exact tools the developers used to make their worlds. There have been plenty of other games as well that released robust editing tools and yet resulted in nothing (or very little) of any quality.

How about the old gold box program Unlimited Adventurers. It was a bomb, and the stuff people made for it was mostly junk.

Relying on fan created content to create an enduring game is never going to result in quality product. There is a reason professional game designers are professionals who get paid, and fans are the people who slap down their money and buy the games.

> It is not a matter of some good mods, it is 24/7 Persistant Worlds

Do you really think mere fans are going to host 24/7 persistent worlds on their computers? Do you think that will provide any degree of reliability? If its so easy, why aren't you running a web server over your connection so you don't have to use geocities? How long is Bioware going to invest money to support the game once they are no longer selling copies?

Seriously.... looking at NWN as some kind of holy grail of online gaming is extremely naive. You said you've done research, but if you had, you would see the history. Fan made content is mostly crap. The majority of people have absolutely no talent or ability for MAKING a game.

Furthermore, the D&D rules might be good for pen and paper gaming, but on a computer, they're crap. You have this massive computer capable of millions of calculations per second, and you tell it to make one d20 roll per round?

I *hope* NWN will be fun. I *hope* that the fan base of millions will result in at least a handful of fun levels/mods/etc. I am sure the game will do well financially on hype alone (look at Dungeon Siege... the game is crap, but it has succeeded simply because so many people bought it at release).

But saying it is going to revolutionize online gaming is just silly. If NWN is going to create armies of superb game designers and hundreds of great "games", why hasn't Microsoft Word created armies of super novelists and hundreds of great free books?
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Old 05-01-2002, 09:47 AM   #15
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I agree - however I'd like to particularly emphasis your words "mostly" and "majority". There are exceptions (take a look at some of the Half-Life mods, for example, which proved more popular than the original game).

I don't believe NWN is going to create any sort of "sudden revolution", any more than the release of DikuMUD did. But give it a few years, and it could end up going the same way - a whole horde of rubbish, with a few gems at the top. Like Diku, it may also provide the inspiration for people to go the whole way and write the own game completely from scratch.

To be honest I find the d20 limiting even for a pen&paper game. Will NWN allow that part of the system to be rewritten?
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Old 05-01-2002, 12:01 PM   #16
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Dulan, I could understand your doubts if Alexander Tau had claimed to have been creating muds for 20 years - but he didn't. There is a big difference between creating "games", and creating "muds" - I've been doing the former for around 15 years, but the latter for only 7.

In regard to the "success" of NWN, I have my doubts, but I do think this is another step (for graphical muds) in the same direction that text-based muds have gone. I have spoken with Alexander about the GDG via email and have been following the discussions on his public forum, but I'm seriously considering taking a more active role. In particular, one of the things he said to me in his email was "Some of the motovation behind this is to help to legitimize the MU* community in the eyes of the world. By making them such a part of the new GDG, and showing how the work that was done in all those 'old text' games has meaning today is part of that."

His point is a very valid one. I'm sure many of you here are familiar with the way the graphical muds (or "MMORPGs" as they like to call themselves) look down on us. The majority of players of games like EverQuest - which is little more than a DikuMUD with a graphical front end - look down on us as being insignificant and outdated (if they even notice us at all) despite being a decade behind us in terms of feature development. We might laugh when they try to tackle problems that we've solved years earlier, but at the end of the day we're losing out, because their attitude seems to be reflected by the gaming industry as a whole. NWN is being praised for doing what AberMUD did 15 years ago - allowing the public to run their own online roleplaying games - and we don't even get mentioned.

I think it's about time that we started giving these newcomers a lesson in history, and Alexander's forums are certainly a good place to start. I want these people to realise that text-based muds are not antiques, but in many cases are actually the forerunners in terms of features and gameplay, and that there is still much that this newer generation of muds can learn from us.
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Old 05-01-2002, 02:36 PM   #17
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Old 05-01-2002, 02:38 PM   #18
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Old 05-01-2002, 07:15 PM   #19
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I think a lot of the skepticism is coming from:

1) Someone claiming they have been making games for 20 years, and yet can do no better than to host a web page on geocities (the land of copyright infringement).

2) Someone claiming that NWN is a revolutionary advancement in gaming, when it is truly nothing new at all, and is severely limited by the use of D&D/d20 rules on a computer.

KaVir, you make (as usual) excellent points about the nature of graphical game feature sets vs. text game feature sets, and about the credibility of text gaming. I know that when I explain what I do, people boggle at the fact that there are no graphics. This is something we have been struggling with for many, many years, and I would definitely support measures to end the innaccurate "low tech" stigma that text games seem to have.

I just have some concerns about the nature of this organization's founding principles, and the source from which it was born (NWN forums).
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Old 05-01-2002, 07:46 PM   #20
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Regardless of any skepticism you might have concerning Alexander himself, the fact still remains that he has provided a forum on which graphical and text-based mudders are meeting. In that respect it doesn't really matter who is running the site - as far as I'm concerned, it's simply a medium through which I can reach some of these people and make it clear just how advanced the forerunners of the text-based community are.

Alexander might be an unknown to us at the moment, but his posts on these forums have been polite, thought-provoking, and in-keeping with the guidelines (as well as the general rules of netiquette). How well known was Icculus before he opened The Mud Connector? How well known was Synozeer before he opened Top Mud Sites? How well known was Kyndig before he opened Kyndig.com?

Of course I've seen many similar projects start up and then collapse within a few months. But even if that happens, I'll still have had the opportunity to open a few minds within the graphical community, so (in my opinion) it will still have been worth it.
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