Ok so at this point you probably are thinking what happened to my other blogs? Well, i got rid of them, not only because they are old, but i figured ranting about how messed up mmo designers are right now doesn't actually fix anything. So, i want to give you all out there a sense of some of the ideas that i have for online mmos with hopes that maybe they will be used. (and for god sakes if you like these ideas hire me! : ))

Welcome to my design blog: Episode 1: Life Experience

So you guys probably all know what it's like to play the mmos out there right now. Basically, you select a class, do quest after quest after quest to level, all with the hopes of defeating some guy in ireland when you hit the level cap. This is all fine and dandy right now, but we need to start thinking of ways to mix it up. I'm not talking about different styles of gameplay, i'm talking about changing the way you level up in general. My idea i like to call the "life experience bar"

Imagine playing world of warcraft, but on top of that purple experience bar for combat there was a green bar, your life experience, and that it was the bar that controlled what level you are. That's kind of what my idea for life experience would be like. Except, instead of only being able to level your character from combat, you could level from fishing, playing cards, or even participating in the auction house.

Let me put it a different way. In real life, everyone has life experiences that make someone who they are. They build on top of eachother until you reach new levels of understanding of your life and you become a stronger person. This is the sort of thing that the life experience bar would represent. Say instead of going on a quest or grinding you just want to spend a pleasant evening catching fish, however you still need to get to the next level to keep up with your friends. With life experience, you could get just as decent of experience for catching a fish as your friend would get for killing a monster. Obviously, the rewards for both items would be different, but you would still be leveling either way.

This sort of idea to me fills the main void that mmos have failed to accomidate in the past and therefore have lost subscribers. That void is that some people don't really always feel like going on quests or grinding, so they don't really feel like playing the game. If a game were to use my "life experience" idea it would most likely be very successful. I really hope a game is created like this.