MMO: REorganized

[olicon]

I have spent quite a bit of time playing MMO games. I have joined guilds, killed dragons, defended my city from PC (player character) attackers, formed guard squads to help protect lower level characters from aggressors, and conduct some businesses in auction houses. But these are mostly individualistic events. I do them by myself, for myself. When I party up in PvE, it's to follow something that has been laid out already, not something that I create. And it's done for the loots, not for the "satisfaction".

But never have I ever seen any real sort of organized crime in an MMO. I heard EVE Online has something close to it, but not quite. You would figure that in games with world PvP enabled, a bunch of people would have banded together to outright destroy anyone who even think about touching their resource nodes. You would have thought that in a world where people are so creative and finding and exploiting bugs, there would be some creative channel for cooperative profiteering going on. Sure, WoW players sell their expertise at Arena, but that's about as far as it goes. And then again, it's also about the loot.

So how do we get away from the loot economy, and more into the organized, social-based, intangible economy?
Surely anything that is social (and therefore calls for more immersion) would be considered extremely geeky, and frowned upon by the mass. But the Machinima scene is rife with creativity, and everyone loves watching them. So why not put on an in game performance troops? Maybe a guided tour? Perhaps a player run newspaper? I don't know if any of these ideas would even work, but I think it would be interesting to have an in game business that is based on interaction rather than digitized goods for once.

edited in an attempt to clarify some stuff. (I hate writing in the morning.)

 

[WhitemageofDOOM]

But never have I ever seen any real sort of organized crime in an MMO.

Gold selling in WoW. There ya go.

 

[olicon]

Gold selling is still not very "organized" in a sense that it requires a group. In fact, it encourage gold sellers to not work as a group to achieve the goal.

And to be fair, I just did some heavy editing just now. What I was trying to say is that most games are based very heavily on the loot aspect, and not much else. There is no organized crime in a sense of people who banned together in an attempt to overwrite the basic rules of society, or to create their own social order.
In a way, I'm not even sure if current infrastructure allow for such social order to be tampered with, let alone recreated entirely. Not in most games anyway.

 

[Bulletinmybrain]

I think Eve is the best game that lets you dabble in crime.. For example this lady got a huge bounty put on her head of ISK and the person hired a mercenary group. Not only did they blow up a really fucking expensive ship and another really fucking expensive ship they STOLE EVERY DIME SHE HAD TUCKED AWAY. And she was podded.