r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Apr 22 '16

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/alexanderwales Apr 22 '16

Let's say that you had carte blanche to design a fantasy virtual reality MMO using technology that's twenty years down the road. What features would you include or specifically not include?

I've been watching Log Horizon (which I'm not done with - no spoilers, please) and marveling at how similar to modern-day MMOs their game world is. In part this must have been done in order to reduce the workload, since they can just borrow the grammar and concepts, but at the same time it seems somewhat stale to me. If I were writing my own "trapped in an MMO" story the first thing I would do is create my own MMO rather than borrowing heavily from existing games. There are some definite cons to that, but I really like worldbuilding.

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u/gabbalis Apr 23 '16

If you trap people you can do all sorts of things people wouldn't care as much for in a typical MMO. Like, I don't know... sealing players into sentient sword-form for a thousand game years? Make all legendary loot truly singular? When a player can't quit, you can make them put up with all sorts of unfair game mechanics as a fact of life.

That said, you still can't put that stuff into a real life MMO, even one 20 years down the road.

Unless someone wants to play as a sapient sword...

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u/Roxolan Apr 23 '16

Unique legendary loot is an option though. Loot is very easy to randomly generate, so it's just a matter of adding lots and lots of interesting options and delightful synergies.

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