According to China Daily, Shi (creator of ZT Online) spends 10 to 15 hours a day gaming. He knows MMORPGs back-to-front, and knows how to attract gamers. He’s hired a marketing team of 2500 people to promote the game in China’s popular internet cafes – through word-of-mouth, advertising, and strange tactics involving beautiful women, like this:

Shi is also hiring a number of attractive female players to play in Internet cafes. “We are giving them virtual golden coins worth 6,000 yuan per year, which are equal to 500 yuan in the real world, to encourage them to play and stay in the games,” he says. His ultimate goal is to make the game more fun and lure more male players, especially first time gamers. “In fact, in China’s cyberspace many male players are very willing to pay the bills for their female counterparts”, he says.

…..hmmmm, interesting marketing tactic.

Anyway, it sounds like they took everything I hate about MMOs and compressed it into one game.

I wonder if you can sell the stuff you win gambling for real money. Or is it a one way proposition and the developer gets all the cash?

Hmmm. Sounds suspiciously like OUR world, although most people would never admit it.

“World of Blackwatercraft”…?

I know how to cure the MMO. In order to get some of the really interesting complexity of the real world, you need to use the same mechanisms that drive complexity in the real world. Everything in the game needs to be Emergent. Everything has to be designable/playable/scriptable by the users, or it must evolve using genetic algorithms. I am currently writing this game.

It’s also raises an interesting point. This game was designed for a Chinese market, and implicit in that, is that Western gamers would find the “buy your way to the top” mentality abhorrent. Is this true?

Given that MMORPGs are like a giant virtual Skinner Box (a great article on that can be found here: http://www.nickyee.com/eqt/skinner.html), it deeply concerns me that people are utilizing them to leverage another equally addictive game.

Being from the U.S. all I can say now is that I’m so glad that for the most part us this style of pay-per-loot MMO isn’t popular and hasn’t taken over the market here yet.

I suspect that part of the reason why the game uses such a business model is because of the rampart software piracy that still exists in China, as well as the lack of easy accessibility to credit cards for most players, many of whom don’t own their own personal computers (they use e-bars). In this environment, the traditional sales-by-game-unit or pay-by-subscription models can be difficult to enforce.

The point of this article was that ZT Online is the ultimate evolution of many common trends in online gaming: Player-organized PVP content, censorship of dissenters, and game mechanics finely tuned to suck as much money from the players as possible.

It’s an excellent article about online gaming, especially in asia. But aside from the addictive quality of these games, they have nothing to do with casinos.