I think the disconnect we have here is how we both understand the game-world and what influencing it truly means. As I said when I gave my views on the MMOs I’ve played (EVE isn’t one of them, which seems to buck the trend in more ways than three), there are dodges and caveats of the stasis of the game world. I assume you’re talking about such things as placing dragon heads in SW.
That pretty much amounts to dunking the hoboclown. You get a neat little prize, the guy goes back to drinking turpentine while he straddles the 2x4, that’s it. In other RPGs, such as… any of them, such an event would only happen once per play-through, not once per week, and the world as a whole would be change in a non-insignificant way. Certainly, it would be far more than, say, an hour-long buff.
You could’ve said, “Tankero, you are as foolish as you are handsome; rep-grinds change how the world reacts to the player in WoW!” Fine, ya got me, that is a good example of an element that disproves my statement. Aside from the fact that you didn’t think of that yourself, you’ve completely undone my argument…
…Except that the way rep-grinds work, it means that there’s only two ways to meaningfully influence the world; you spend gold buying stuff to turn in, or you kill crap that gradually fills a bar. There is no other meaningful way to interact with the world, and one of the staples of the RPG genre is the ability to talk your way through at least ONE situation. Given the fact that, aside from combat, MMO player-characters are completely passive entities (even with AoCs dialogue system), that possibility just doesn’t exist.
The fact, [b]fact[/b] that player-characters in MMOs are completely passive, it means that they’re essentially spectators, readers, the audience of an MMO’s world as it goes on its merry way, which means that…
…is completely false. You don’t do anything that advances the storyline, you just ‘flip the page’, ‘turn the crank’, and any other such aphorism. You never guide the story, the story is already there. You could argue that this is also true in so many other games that there’s no point in bringing that up. There, once more, I’d have to yield, except that in MMOs there is no storyline, by definition, because there is no end. You get to witness plenty of storylines, sure, but you’re never directly involved in any of them. All you’re doing is triggering the next text-box you’re not going to read anyway.
