Legit MQ2 style functionality built into an MMOG?

[battaile]

I'm wondering if Sony or some future game is going to learn from MQ2 and give folks some way to let their character stay in the game world performing some form of useful function, while the player is not there.

The win-wins are all over the place:

Truly persistent world - No longer would your character poof from the game world for game months at a time when you're offline.

Casual/Power gamer decisions are less of an issue - Could make a lot of design issues easier, power-gamers would still be the ones doing the big raids, but the casual gamer wouldn't have to see their characters fall horribly behind because they have limited playtime.

Players love it for the reasons we love MQ2 - Reduce tedium.

Reduce bandwidth - Instead of having to use 3rd party software to simulate a human at the keyboard, or some poor guy chain-drinking pepsis til 4am so he can skill up smithing, the client would just have to send the macro request to the server and then all processing could be done serverside until the client give the quit macro command.


Anyway, just some stuff I was thinking on. Seems like whenever the devs do a "cant beat em join em" it works out best for them and us.

[Lax]

Current technologies limit the server as far as processing. As technologies advance you will see a lot more server-side calculations.