I am absolutely on board with the 'livelier' cities thing. I think there is a point of diminishing returns that you must be absolutely careful with but ya, I agree that it would be awesome as heck to be a PC and walk into a city that looks every bit as if it is operating and working just fine on its own. People with 'business' are doing just that.
People aren't always 'home' or 'in distress' or 'at work' but there is at least an appearance that they are 'living' beyond standing around with a yellow ! above their heads waiting for the next 'hero' to come along and save their lost cat.
But this is also one of those danger areas we tend to get ourselves into when we think "How cool would it be if.."
Ok, I get it, once maybe. How cool would it be if Freeport ran itself and everyone had things 'to do', the NPC's that is. Man that would be cool, sort of. I mean Boston runs just fine without me, people, and lots of them, are ALL busy and going from here to there and NONE of them need me to quest for them. Having said that I don't drive into the city to sit back and watch it happen.... I might, I don't know, but certainly not more than once
What we 'think' might be interesting, innovative and cool, sometimes is a hell of lot less cool when we really dig into what it would mean.
Ya that's a great idea! I love the thought of quest givers not always standing in their same location, handing out the same quests. But how much do I like it when I'm 'second man in'? And that quest I needed to progress a quest line has an NPC who's 'not home'? I have to wait 45 minutes of game time for him to 'come home'? Huh? Ok that sucks....
I make the same mistake many do in sometimes thinking of MMO content like I think of single player RPG content, I think many do. I am sure a bunch of people can come up with 10+ solutions to the problem above but at the end of the day the bottom line is if 1-2 people are 'enjoying' something and the other 8 out of ten are not, that sucks for 80% of the people 'experiencing' that 'cool thing'.
