I would've asked: "Where's my Elite 4?" :(
Market forces in an Elite-themed MMO environment would make it such an enjoyable experience. One can imagination hunting around star systems affected by war, supplying them medicine (or even black market weapons!), having to compete with other players to get the best deal.
Do I upgrade my trade capacity to make more of a profit or do I install a laser bank to reduce the risk of making any? What will the other guy(s) do? Can I hire somebody to protect me who will take a share of the profit?
Infinitely more fun than the 'grind...grind...grind...' dynamic that plagues MMOs these days.
However, I would think the next Elite should come in the form of a MMO.
Actually, this response is directed towards shogunmike also. Just in case you haven't heard of Eve, it's a spaced themed MMO very much to the tune of Elite. You can make a living mining, trading, fighting. The factions are split onto two levels: Corporations (companies that employ/hire individual players) and Alliances (gropps of corporations with similar vision/goals)
The ecomony is almost entirely player driven.. the materials are mined by players, the equipment is built by players from those materials. You are free to engage in hostile activity even in controlled space, although the penalty is severe.
It's worth a look. The freedom of play has allowed some players to gain notoriety even in the mass media (Note: exchanging game money for real world currency is a violation of the rules):
I'm sure I can dig answers out to these questions elsewhere, but I thought I'd ask how the economy is balanced. For instance, mining new materials obviously increases supply. To what extent is this activity capped by the game mechanics in order to keep demand at a reasonable level?
I've heard of space stations being bought and sold, but I think this was a separate MMO. Not far off restoring houses and flipping for profit in the real world!
The Wikipedia page seems to be comprehensive though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Online#Economy
I would take a look at the development section also. They use a Python variant called Stackless (http://www.stackless.com) which provides lightweight threads and message passing. I actually started using this as an alternative to regular CPython.
I had enough trouble stopping playing WoW.
Why does everything have to be MMO these days. MMOs usually revolve around doing repetitive 'work' to gain points so you can buy better stuff than other players, I find that boring.
(yes, EVE online is nice, CCP did an excellent job, but IMO we don't need another one of those)
Those odds are incredibly stacked against you:
- an MMO inherently requires a lot of the player's time, so the by-far most won't be playing more than one. Would they choose your game?
- network effects: players will usually flock to a game that has a lot of players already.
- people that know Elite are generally older with jobs, the target audience for MMOs are younger players with a lot of free time.
With EVE Online being the big elephant in this room, I doubt an Elite MMO will be much of a succes. Then again, feel free to prove me wrong, I'd probably sign up just for old times sake :)
The cost of the infrastructure servers isn't high compared to the 1000s of man years salary to build a major game, and with cloud services it can scale so you only pay as new customers come in.
MMOs tend to be older players, mostly male in 30s. These are the audience that can pay $30-60/month without noticing. The Teenagers tend to be casual gamers and a bigger market for phones/consoles - especially 1-2 player games.