What is important to you?

[Omega Mark V]

I have something up my sleeve.
 
If you had to pick 4 things important to you when picking a game what would they be?

1. Gameplay. If the game is broken, or if it's uninspiring/uninteresting to play, it isn't worth playing. Thus why some older games are still fun to play today.
2. Story/Lore. Games are like books. The player needs to feel connected with the character(s) they're playing, and not be confused or bored with the overall plot.
3. Re-playability. If the game is fun, or has enough things to keep the player engrossed in content to continue, it will be re-playable, thus extending the life and quality of the game.
4. Simplicity. If a game gets too complex, it's not going to have as much of an avid following as a simpler game. A simple interface, controls, and gameplay system makes a game good. (Ex. look at the Super Mario Brothers games. Run and jump, yet it's fun.)

If you had to pick 4 things important to you in your opionon of a development studio (Blizzard, Paragon, ect), what would they be?

1. Interest in their fanbase/players. If a Dev team doesn't care for their fanbase or playerbase, they will undoubtedly fail. (*cough* SOE)
2. Interest in their game/Inspiration. If the team doesn't care for the game they're making, it won't turn out as well as an enthusiastically created game would. This, and creating an original title. (AKA: Not an obvious CoD/WoW clone.)
3. Continuation to serve the playerbase. I've witnessed some game teams that cease to cater to their community, or their feedback. It's bad.
4. Timely responses. If something 'breaking' happens in game, be it a bug or exploit, hackers, etc., they need to be on top of the situation. Control of a game you create is undoubtedly important.

If you had to pick 4 things that effected your opinon of a distributor (NCSoft, EA, etc), what would they be?

1. Not stepping into Dev team affairs. For instance, EA recently F'd up Bioware. If a Dev team is supposed to create something good, the publisher can't be breathing down their necks.
2. Even support of all their games and their communities. If one game series receives support in a certain way, be it Steam releases or game hubs, other games should receive the same treatment. This also goes for how the publisher would support their titles.
3. Showing the consumers' some love. Valve is an awesome Developer and Publisher. Period. This is because they cater to their community by giving them good support with both their games, and platforms, and support.
4. Not creating a 'service' or 'terms/condition(s)' that hurt consumers. Needless to say, Origin, UPlay, and other platforms that are required to play games. We should be buying licenses to play games as we are able to, not to buy a service we're forced to use.

That's what I look for in each game I play. Not just MMO's.

Omega Mark V, explanation complete.

[Stellar Agent]

Game Requirements:

1. Gameplay
2. Storyline
3. Repeatable Content: a certain amount of grinding is to be expected in any online game, as such it should be just as much fun to play the tenth time as it was the first.
4. UI / Interface

Studio Requirements:

1. Players First: You made it for us, didn't you?
2. Dev's should be players too!  If you aren't interested in playing your own game, WHY are you working on it?
3. Communication, communication, communication.  'nuff said
4. If it ain't broke, why are you "fixing" it?  Also, if it is broke, WHY aren't you fixing it?

Distributor Requirements:

1. Respect for the players and for the developers
2. Willingness to leave the developers alone. Exceptions include if an owner has a cool idea for a character/story arc and wants to implement it (i.e. effectively behaving *as* a dev).
3. Compassion - not willing to kill a project until it is financially absolutely necessary, and, if doing so, being as humane about it as possible.
4. Imagination - recognize devs who have imagination, and hire them!

What Chaparral said.

[eabrace]

OK, finally getting around to this...

If you had to pick 4 things important to you when picking a game what would they be?

* Casual-friendly - Can I log in, spend half an hour playing, and log back out whenever I feel like it (server maintenance window not withstanding)?  If I do so, am I penalized in any way?  For example, if I log in to DDO, start a quest that ends up being a very arduous and long task, I have to complete the quest in order to gain any significant amount of XP as all XP is based on quest completion and no XP is given simply for defeating a single kobold.  This means that I am often limited to the content I can participate in without setting aside hours at a time to play the game, and I only have the ability to do that between the hours of about 8 PM and 4 AM on Saturday night.  (Quests also reset after five minutes outside the dungeon, which further complicates matters if the quest door is a considerable distance from where you bind yourself to rez after being defeated.)  With CoH, by contrast, I can log in, start a mission or not, and even if I can't complete an entire mission in half an hour, I will have at least gained XP just for defeating the critters that got in my way.  That might not be much progress, but it's progress, just the same.  So, even if I only have half an hour to play after getting home, taking the dog for a walk, eating dinner, and paying bills, it's still worth logging in to CoH to play for a bit.  DDO, not so much.

* Broad Market Appeal - You can't please all of the people all of the time, but you can generally find a way to please a whole lot of people most of the time.  How many stories have we heard from people who had absolutely no interest in superheroes or comic books that ended up being drawn into CoH for any number of reasons - not limited to, but including: "I just couldn't stop making new characters because I loved the creation process!" or, as one of my SG members put it, "Dude, I can f*&^ing fly." Which brings me to my next point...

* Ease of Travel - When I'm playing other MMOs, I find myself constantly bitching about one thing in particular:  travel grind.  Yes, Tatooine is very pretty in some places, but it's mostly just sand, and I already saw all of it with my Trooper.  I don't feel the need to see all of it again with my Jedi Knight, again with my Bounty Hunter, again with my Smuggler... Yes, you can pay a buttload of in-game currency to learn how to pilot speeders and buy speeders to ride, but you can't ride the speeder everywhere, you can be shot off of it while zipping by a Tuskan, and it's not that much faster than running.  And the very few quick travel powers that let you actually jump from one place to another on the same world or back to the home fleet have terribly long recharge times (you can only really use the Fleet Emergency Pass once per day.)  Probably the best thing they eventually did for CoH was to start allowing us to skip from one zone to another.  It started by allowing us to select a zone at the train station rather than having to get off at every stop and get back on the train to go to the next zone.  It got even better when we gained the ability to build teleporters in bases.  It continued to improve with things like the Base Transporter power, the O-zone portal, the ability to travel from any zone to any other zone using the train (eliminating the yellow and green line restrictions), the Mission Transporter... and none of those hurt the game at all.  In fact, they made it so much more pleasant to play.  DDO has a pendant you can earn after you gain enough favor with one of the houses, but it's only useable in city zones, so if you have to slog across a wilderness area to reach a quest door, it's worthless to you.  And even though D&D has a flight spell, DDO only has one place I can think of in the middle of a raid where you can actually fly (very slowly) around the room - and you look like you're sitting in a chair when you do it.

* Story - Probably the biggest single aspect of CoH that's always held me here - and continues even now to fascinate me - is the rich lore that this game has.  And it did it all from scratch, not from inheriting it from existing comic books, rule books that already laid the world out for the developers, or a movie franchise.  (Yes, I'm aware that most of this game's background was already part of the world that Sean Fish created for his Champions gaming sessions before CoH was even proposed.  But, again, he did it from scratch.)  You know what interests me about every update DDO makes to the game?  It's getting to play through more plot.  I don't give a damn about the new gear they put out there for people to grid toward.  I like seeing new places and new NPCs and learning about their history and how they tie into the other parts of the game that I've already experienced.  You know what I don't like about DDO?  Anything I haven't played through because it's inaccessible unless you're in a raid party - and no raid party wants to go run that raid because it has low XP and crappy loot.

* Solo-friendly - OK, I know, this makes five points, but this one's just as important to me.  I don't mind teaming some nights, but let's be honest here, sometimes what everyone else wants to go run isn't what I want to go run, and I've only got half an hour to play, so there isn't time for "we'll go run yours first and then we'll go run mine".  That and I don't always like to team with people.  I fall into that odd category of players who are logging into an MMO, but aren't always particularly keen on that second 'M' because we occasionally need some "me" time.  And yeah, I'm familiar with the "then go play on your Xbox or Playstation" response that's usually thrown out there.  For starters, that response does nothing but remind me why I want to solo rather than team.  Further, it doesn't help build a community.  Imagine how many more players we might have here right now helping us to make noise about saving CoH if no one had ever chased off any solo players.  Besides, I might have an Xbox or Playstation, but there aren't any games that play like CoH on those consoles, so that response doesn't even make sense.

I'm cutting myself off here.  More things keep popping into my head as I type, but I'm already over four. 

If you had to pick 4 things important to you in your opionon of a development studio (Blizzard, Paragon, ect), what would they be?

* Creativity at all levels - Not just unique combat systems or puzzles.  Everyone from mission builders and zone builders to story writers and visual artists should be given as much creative freedom as possible.  If they want to add something that's not possible, rather than just saying, "no", the question of "what would we need to do in order to allow that" should be asked.

* Elegant programming - Not just code that runs on my platform without crashing my OS, but code that takes up the smallest amount of resources (memory, processor, disk space) possible.  Not only does that make my PC happier, but it generally means that when a developer leaves and another steps in to take their place that the code is easier to understand and maintain.

(... to be continued since I have groceries to pick up, bills to pay, a dog to let out of her kennel...)

[Teege]

If you had to pick 4 things important to you when picking a game what would they be?
* Ease of use (Gameplay, interface, tutorials, character creation, etc)
* Variety and Quantity of quality content (not to mention visually appealing)
* Storylines and character creation/development. Can I make a noticeable difference in the world?
* Not being forced to PvP or having to grind insanely (time wise and/or same old repeated content)

If you had to pick 4 things important to you in your opinion of a development studio what would they be?
* Presence in-game (playing, events, etc) and on forums
* Open communication (in all regards)
* Quality content delivered in a timely manner
* Listen to your players ideas, concerns, etc (honest non-scripted answers, prove you're listening to us)

If you had to pick 4 things that effected your opinion of a distributor what would they be?
* Aggressively handle griefers as opposed to doing nothing when they harm others' gameplay (I put this here since NCsoft handled in-game moderation)
* Give the developers what they need and let them get the job done
* Communicate (plans, problems, don't cut a game and fire 80 people out of nowhere on a Friday)
* Advertise the game and don't make it ALL about money (understand and respect the players/developer community)