[Googi]

Originally Posted by Mykel

I find it funny how you can find it acceptable to make an entire fantasy story about a character in a game that is run by NPCs, but the fact that you would have to accept an NPC as a king just seems ridiculous.

My comment was an exaggeration, but the point is that there's no sense of respect. Having an NPC king is the same as having someone you don't respect as king. If I get an order from an NPC it's like getting an order from Moon Goddess. I'm probably going to flout the order and just do whatever I want. Maybe I'd get around to doing it if I was bored enough.

Sure, you can enforce orders with punishment or by offering economic rewards, but having to do that just proves that you can't make RPing fun enough in and of itself and have to force/bribe players into doing it.

Originally Posted by konidias

You've never enjoyed playing a single player RPG before? I find that hard to believe.

That's completely different. I don't play a linear console RPG and expect a sense of community.

Originally Posted by konidias

Just because the king positions were once filled by human players, doesn't mean that npc kings would be worse or any less fun. If the kings would have been npcs from the start, you would probably be arguing that they shouldn't be made into player kings.

I admit that it might be hypothetically possible to create NPC kings that are superior to player kings. I don't, however, believe that you, any member of your development team, or any Graalian past or present has the scripting ability to actually accomplish this.

Originally Posted by konidias

You're simply arguing about change. The change could be for the better but you're not taking that into consideration simply because it's not what you know. It's not as though people can't fall in love with made up characters... There's no difference between liking an npc king and following orders from him, than following a storyline in a singleplayer RPG, or liking characters in a singleplayer RPG story because you find them interesting or something.

I highly doubt your NPC Kings are going to have fully-functioning AI capable of political strategy. I suspect that they will be highly staff-controlled. I find it interesting that you're willing to outsource kingdom leadership to NPCs but you opposed outsourcing simple police tasks to them (in the form of rock owner tags).