Goblin Squad Member
|
What do people think about "The Pilot Program", like the pilot before a series starts...Given Ryans new clarification, I am back to this suggestion as the best I have seen thus far. Not too wordy, not genre specific.
I think the word content would help in there somewhere
The Content Pilot Program or The New Content Pilot Program
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
When I think 'Pilot' I do think of the numerous TV show pilots that fail. (Something like 70% of them). I'm not sure if that's the subliminal message you want.
If I can recap - you want a title that
a) expresses that the core game is finished but in a limited release (i.e no beta)
b) is not PFO specific
c) is recognizable to the core MMO community - and ideally easily translatable to the general public.
I can think of two directions in thinking that fit these criteria.
The first is the naming conventions that accompany ubuntu and MacOS releases. You could follow a theme, for example, using humanoids of increasing CR: Kobold leads to goblin leads to orc leads to bugbear leads to ogre leads to...
If you wanted a more mythologically rooted cycle that was shorter I would direct you to Hesiod's 5 Ages of Man.
Ages of Man
The 5 ages are:
Golden Age (Gold) - initial release.
Silver Age (Silver) - fleshes out mining and resource gathering and crafting.
Bronze Age (Bronze) - fleshes out the mass combat aspect of the game.
Heroic Age (Heroic) - first big territorial additions to the game and/or an upgrade in magical items. Heroic things.
Iron Age (Iron) - Fleshes out the biggest nation-building aspects of the game.
I've added the parentheses for what you might call the releases. The definitions are paraphrased from Hesiod - he really defined the Iron Age as the period when nations sprang up.
You could further clarify the releases by following the Apollo program mentality. This would make each age a 'Program'. So the Gold Program would culminate in the initial release. We would then be in the Golden age. Each update would be a silver update. So you'd have silver update 1, 2, 3.. until you reached the design goals for the Silver Program. Then we'd be living in the silver age. Rinse, repeat.
Note that you could expand on Hesiod by adding additional ages - adamant, mithril, diamond, mythic, etc... But I'd recommend against too many ages. Getting to iron should take you a few years at least.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on the matter, for now.
John
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
(Borrowing or adopting some of the great ideas from earlier in this thread)
Morphogenesis: (from the Greek morphê shape and genesis creation, literally, "beginning of the shape") is the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape. (from Wikipedia)
morphogenic development period, morphogens/morphogeniac subscribers,
pluses - all the benefits of genesis without the religious conotations, easy to "grok", fits and doesn't sound a disgusting as empryonic or pupal; minus - not horribly simple, the word morphogenesis is long
____
ISOPOD -- Incremental Subscription for Obtaining Player Originating Development
minuses - isopods are scary, ugly critters, especially the tongue replacers; "isopod" itself doesn't help grok what GW is trying to say
trivia - its a well known fact that goblins love the taste of roasted isopods
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
What do people think about "The Pilot Program", like the pilot before a series starts...
Ryan, I think the only negative there is the potential impression that the "real" game may not happen. People familiar with the TV paradigm of that usage recognize that a ton of "pilot shows" get released in the off-season or to limited audiences but the majority of them never get picked up and turned into series. I'm not sure if that's an impression you want to make on people?
Other then that, I like it.
CEO
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I wanted to throw something in here for folks to chew upon. I am not sure folks really realize what we are planning for Pathfinder Online. So I am going to bring in an analog—paizo.com.
When we launched paizo.com seven years or so ago, it had the bare functionality of an online store and a messageboard. You could browse for products, put a product into a shopping cart, and check out. Then, you could go to the messageboards and start a topic or post a message in an already existing topic. There weren't many bells and whistles to the website. It had your basic functionality.
Then, over the last seven years, we have iterated on both the online store and the messageboards based on customer feedback. People asked for wishlists, so we made them. We innovated the idea of the sidecart so subscribers could load up non-subscription products to ship with their monthly subscription shipment. Behind the scenes, we did a TON of work on shipping so the website was super smart about how it ships things to give the lowest cost to the customers.
In the messageboards, people asked for a way to know how many new posts there are in a thread that they've read, so we added that. Then they asked for a way to see what threads they posted in. We added the dots next to those threads and then added the focus element. When customers asked for ways to hide threads they didn't want cluttering up their view, we added a way to collapse those down.
Basically, we have been constantly innovating and expanding the functionality of paizo.com with customer feedback since its launch. When it launched, it was a perfectly functional online store and messageboards, but since then, it has become a much better place to do both of those things and we aren't done! It is basically never done. It is a constant work in progress.
Pathfinder Online is going to be like that. When it launches, it will be a fully functional MMO, but it will be missing some of the bells and whistles you might expect from a typical MMO. Then, through interaction with you guys, we will constantly make new stuff for the MMO. It will truly never be done until we decide to shut it all down. There isn't going to be this phase where everything gets made and then it becomes finished. It is going to evolve on a regular, constant basis, using community feedback to continue to add content and functionality, and together we will continue to make Pathfinder Online more and more amazing!
And I think THAT is the disconnect. Ryan isn't looking for a name for a phase of the game development. He is looking for a name for this type of game development period. This iterative, back and forth with the customers, constantly evolving and improving, never truly finished game development.
If you jump into Pathfinder Online three years after its launch, you will have just as much of an ability to interact with and affect the continued growth and improvement of Pathfinder Online as you would have if you had been there on day one.
So, what do you call that?
-Lisa
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Well, if you want to get down to what you are doing technicaly, I would say that it's... Player Assisted Iterative Development...but I'm not sure the acronym would end up being what you would want.. P.A.I.D. ;)
Hahaha :)... I think that is one of the indicators: Away from "paid beta" homing towards "crowd design".
Crypic have: Video: Cryptic's solution for new MMO content: Let the players make it! aka Player-Created Content; perhaps Player-Designed Content?
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Ok, got some more time, read some more, so here are some more Ideas
Player-Developer Refinement
Perpetual player developement - I particularyly like this one
Player opinion progression
User guided expansion
player advised game advancement
I'll think of some more later, but hopefully one of those is a step in the right direction.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
@Alexander_Damocles - she's telling you exactly what we're looking for.
Thanks for the clarification! You might want to consider altering part of the blog, then, because it reads as something else entirely (to me).
"As we've said before, we're going to be opening the game to paying players in a nontraditional manner, gating the number of new players into the game at less than 5,000 a month for most of the first year.The players in the game during that period are going to be engaged in something that's a lot more than just a "beta test," so we don't really want to call that period a "beta." Beta-testing MMOs is often a synonym for stress-testing—a way to test the balance of various mechanics, or a dress rehearsal for launch."
I read that and think of terms for the first few months, not the lifetime of the game.
I'll get cracking on new terms!
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Hmmm.. I've re-read Lisa's post and on the one hand, having read through everything else we know about the game (the sandboxness, the EVEness, etc...), I think that that is what stands out more as being unique. Maybe it's because my immediate previous experience was with City of Heroes where I really felt that the devs (in the NCSoft iteration at least) did a good job with player feedback. It was never exactly what I wanted, but it was usually an acceptable compromise. And more importantly, it remained an enjoyable game long past when it had any right to be. lol.
So if you ask me to describe a game where theres an iterative process between devs and the player base, i'd call it CoH. But clearly that's unacceptable.
What I think of when I think of PFO is that the devs are providing us with a continually evolving sandbox. Maybe "evolving sandbox" is the term you're looking for. I also think of PFO as a ruleset, expanding at regular intervals. So maybe "expanding ruleset" is the phrase you're looking for. The process is iterative, so maybe an "Iterative MMO" is the phrase you're looking for (IMMO).
I will say that I thumbed through one of the thesauri on google and there really aren't any terms better than "iterative, sandbox, evolving and expanding. A lot of the other words have semi-negative connotations (for example repetitive implies boredom or 'grind' while improving implies that the first release is incomplete or unfinished). Expanding implies that each subsequent addition adds more flavor to the game (as in an Expansion pack) but the game was just fine beforehand.
My honest recommendation is to grab all the individual words you like so far, put them on a white board and start playing around with word order. Do it long enough (and drink enough tall beverages) and you'll be just like a Madison Avenue ad firm!
Good luck! If I think of any other useful buzzwords I'll pass them along.
Goblinworks Founder
|
Lisa, you'd need to rename the genre. MMORPG, doesn't fit that.
Massively Multiplayer Online Player Developed Role Playing Game, perhaps?
Community Online Game - COG
I think community covers the direct relationship between the customer and the developers, not just the players. We as a community of players, developers Managers, Designers, artists, writers will help mold this game from its initial stage and well into the future.
I also think MMOG and MMORPG as a coined term is out-dated and we need to evolve and move on from it. COG might just be the answer.