When Roy Trubshaw and I worked on MUD1, we saw it as a means of giving people freedom. For players, freedom to do and to be; for us, freedom to make our imaginations real (well, OK, virtual). Most of the early UK virtual worlds that followed had that same sense of idealism. After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developers.

When Roy Trubshaw and I worked on MUD1, we saw it as a means of giving people freedom. For players, freedom to do and to be; for us, freedom to make our imaginations real (well, OK, virtual). Most of the early UK virtual worlds that followed had that same sense of idealism. After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developers.

When Roy Trubshaw and I worked on MUD1, we saw it as a means of giving people freedom. For players, freedom to do and to be; for us, freedom to make our imaginations real (well, OK, virtual). Most of the early UK virtual worlds that followed had that same sense of idealism. After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developers.

When Roy Trubshaw and I worked on MUD1, we saw it as a means of giving people freedom. For players, freedom to do and to be; for us, freedom to make our imaginations real (well, OK, virtual). Most of the early UK virtual worlds that followed had that same sense of idealism. After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developers.

When Roy Trubshaw and I worked on MUD1, we saw it as a means of giving people freedom. For players, freedom to do and to be; for us, freedom to make our imaginations real (well, OK, virtual). Most of the early UK virtual worlds that followed had that same sense of idealism. After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even stranger. Someone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted points. Ian made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic research. While I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developers.

Nerf ® originally is a soft plastic foam material for making toys, invented by Parker Brothers, now owned by Hasbro. The idea is that if you replace the wooden toy sword, a toy classic for over 1000 years, with a nerf sword, the child is doing considerably less damage to the furniture and his little brother. Same principle for arrows, boomerangs, balls, and all other sorts of weapon-like or throwing toys. Now imagine you are a heroic warrior in a fantasy world, and somebody sneakily replaces your magical mithril sword with a look-alike sword made out of nerf. You unknowingly attack a monster you used to be able to beat, and now you do much less damage. You barely escape with your life, cursing loudly. You have been "nerfed". Sounds like an improbable scenario, but in fact it happens all the time in MMORPG. Welcome to the wonderful world of MMORPG nerfs.

At the lower levels you can not do much, not even leave your starting island, as you can't afford the price of a ticket for a boat or teleport. Progressing isn't much fun in itself, the developers obviously hope that the rewards of reaching the higher levels will keep you motivated. And of course at higher levels you can more easily kill other players. This game is targeted at a group of hard core players, of which there seem to be many in the games country of origin, South Korea. In the United States the appeal of this will be limited to a much smaller group, and the usually more casual European players will probably not be interested at all.

At which point you notice that the last 4 years of MMORPG game economy development have went unnoticed by Lineage 2. There is no such thing as an auction house or bazaar in Lineage 2. To sell something to another player, you have to be online. You can set up a "shop" for either buying or selling, by setting a price to the items in your inventory. Then you presumably go afk while your character sits in the middle of the village with a shop sign over his head, hoping for passerbyes buying your wares. If you aren't afk, you can do like many others and spam the shout channel with your Want-to-sell and Want-to-buy offers. The whole tradeskill and player economy is badly implemented and not much fun. On the other hand, if you object to losing xp and possibly even items to any random passerby killing you with one blow, because he is 10 levels higher than you and you are resting from a combat, L2 is not so much fun any more.

Only dwarves can create items, being able to gain the first trade skill at level 5. But gaining that skill means spending all the skill points you accumulated up to then, and allows you only to create level 1 items. The only way to gain resources is to kill monsters. Yes, not only hides, but also things like ore or coal are monster drops. And unless you specialize your dwarf into a special resource collector class at level 20, these resources are rather rare drops. As example, my dwarf leveled up to level 6 before he had enough skill points for the craft item skill. From all the mobs he killed up to then he had found only 2 resources. And for making a level 1 leather tunic he needed first a recipe (another rare drop), and then 44 resources. I never managed to get as far in the beta to make even a single item.

At least at the start you level up fast enough. But these are actually just pseudo-levels. Your hitpoints and other stats go up, but you do not get the opportunity to make any decision regarding your character development. Only after you gained level 5 to 7, are you able to buy the first skill with the skill points you gain in parallel to xp. Spellcasters start with 1 or 2 spells, and get their first new spell at level 7. At the start there are only 2 character classes, fighter or spellcaster, and only at level 20 can you specialize into one of two or three subdivisions. Many levels later there is another subdivision, so you are moving up some sort of character classes tree. All in all character development is unsatisfying, because there are very few decisions to make, and development is very slow.