I am still following Shroud of the Avatar, by Richard Garriott, et al, and there have been some interesting developments. For example, originally, SotA was projected to be only a semi-MMO, in that instead of having central servers, much of the action was going to be hosted on individual players machines, and other players would be added to your instance based upon how well they matched with your game configuration, such as whether you were flagged for PvP, or not.

I was skeptical of that approach, because it limited the number of people who could be visible to each other, and how can you have a good guild/faction war if the number of players are limited in an instance?

Well, they've decided that won't work for technical/exploit/security reasons, and because it had REALLY bad implications for PvP, so they've gone back to central servers, which means there need not be a player restriction any more.

The interesting thing about that to me is not the player limit aspect, although that is important, but the fact that they are planning for PvP as a fundamental part of their system architecture and game design.

I am still pressing hard for Open PvP/Full Loot, and a resumption of the PK/Anti-PK wars, but it is still early days, with the game release not scheduled for another year or so.

To the everlasting glory of the infantry...

Owain ab Arawn
KGB Supreme Knight
King's High Council