You can make player's sign an NDA when they want to play your beta, right?
And you could make players sign an NDA when playing a game that wasn't in beta, right?
Yah, it'd be "weird" and everything, but then you could pursue people legally if they made spoiler sites and published unauthorized screenshots and stuff, right?
People could still tell each other whether they thought something sucked or not, and I'm sure there'd be buddies breaking the NDA to give each other hints heh, but whatever, its just gotta be close enough for government work ahaha.
And you could still advertise your game on your company website and make deals with other places as you saw fit.
And I'm not totally against spoiler junk, especially in a annoying amatuer-ass roleplaying game, but if you made a really good game that was the way it was on purpose, and not just to make people waste time with chaos theory and cognitive dissonace time-investment garbage, it'd be nice to be able to protect that as an asset.
Plus you could make your in-game Cartographer's Guild and Library of Lore or something like that for those guys that like to do that stuff to help the other players, where it would strengthen in-game bonds to actual players that helped you by teaching you stuff.
Yah it sorta goes in the exact opposite diretion of what everybody is doing and I think there'd be some brutal-ass violent fights on the internet when you went after people (which might be great for getting the word out about your game if you didn't totally hose it up and end up looking like the bad guy heh) but I still think its kinda cool to think about it.
I just started thinking of this from the "maze" idea where you start out by yourself (even though you might have other buddies playing the game), and then you need to work with a stranger to overcome some obstacle, y'know, to sorta pull the loners into gangs in a game, and I din't wanna have my first two-player "obstacle" ruined 'cause some pecker-head that read a spoiler site would be all rushing you through it like we used to do in DDO with that "dude you need to pull lever three already so I can get the hell out of here" stuff or whatever ahaha.
I'd never do anything as lame as some lever puzzle, y'know, I'm more into scaring the hell out of people, and I don't think you gotta (or oughta) make a game design where people gotta enter a game in the same place twice, but I'm just using that as an example.
1 comment:
Theoretically the early beta tests are designed to elevate the 'goodness' or playability of a game, so I'm all for an NDA at that point as the denizens of the internet are not well known for a considered and common sensical approach to information of a negative nature.
I really like the idea of an in game Cartographers Guild or Loremaster Library. For so called Massively Multiplayer Games there often seems to be very little to 'encourage' players to team up apart from making mobs too hard to take down solo and splitting needed skill/power/spell sets across classes.
Having, in game, the ability for someone else to pass on a vital bit of information that allows someone to access a quest or exploit a weakness, or display a map of an unexplored area is a good starting point. I can see some design being required to ensure fair use and prevent exploits, but it sounds like some nice concepts to possibly enhance social as opposed to combat interaction.
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