I actually have no value judgments to offer about where SWG’s design is going now, nor where it was before. I’m more intrigued by the larger picture.

When you invite players into your online world, you make a compact with them, that compact being that you won’t change things all too much. They have a reasonable expectation that the apple cart won’t be tossed too drastically. Sometimes, you have to. Sometimes, you make changes bigger than people were expecting. Sometimes, you add things which fundamentally change the social calculus of an online world, as the Honor System did with WoW. But in most cases, the game doesn’t change that much. For better or for worse.

So the SWG thing kinda terrifies me a bit.

Often overlooked fact of MMO Live teams – they change. A lot. Most people can last on a live team about, say, 18 months before they get tired of having their mothers being denigrated on the official forums for things outside of their control. I think UO had five lead designers in the time I worked at Origin. And new blood coming onto a project bring their own ideas and ideologies. The thing that keeps those from being too drastic is player inertia – most players like things kind of how they are. The players who don’t, by and large, have left. It costs far less to retain a customer than recruit one, so retain them!

If the SWG changes prove to be successful, it could in theory put every MMO at risk of major realignment, from every producer who has ever had a “great idea” (common examples: clone another MMO, add more cleavage, add in-game advertising). Right now, player inertia keeps many of these things from happening. If SWG manages to gain more new users than they lose from the suddenly disenfranchised Rangers and Creature Handlers, this will be a precedent cited in design meetings a thousand times. For better or for worse.

Original comments thread is here.