MMORPG News - 10 Ways to Fix MMOs

Tim writes about a piece at Trembling Hand titled 10 Ways to Fix MMOs and inspired by Tom Chick's recent (and controverisal) 5 Reasons MMOs Are Broken.  Number #1 is making the worlds more engaging:

MMOs tend to come in one of two flavours: theme park or sandbox. But theme parks, like WoW, have come to the fore in recent years, probably because of the grand success of its exemplar. However, theme parks must be done well in order to be convincing, and WoW does do it well. Others don't.

In fact, Warhamme Online is an interesting case in point. You'd think Warhammer would have the ideal pretext for a theme park: a world that doesn't need to change significantly because it's always in a state of war, and no one side can win outright. But it fails, with many on the forums (myself included) finding the static nature of the world to be hollow and unfulfilling - it doesn't take long before you really feel as though your character can make virtually no impact on the world. Which is odd, because in WoW you also know you can't make much impact on the world, but the illusion that you can is more convincing.