Note to people who want to make MMORPG's

I've noticed that very few people who are into this whole "inflation" thing actually know how game programming works. I'll try to keep this short and sweet.

MMO games require your own servers that are always up and running and generally have very large amounts of hard drive space to store player data. They also require a very fast internet connection, likely business-level speed, so that players can play without huge amounts of lag. Not to mention how incredibly difficult it is create a stable, secure world involving unusually large numbers of people connecting at one time, some of which have the knowledge to hack the program as they wish if it's not secured well. Not to mention there are probably a large variety of spells, abilities, and items to program, provided that the abilities mostly do more than just provide stat boosts. Let's not forget just getting the controls right, which I doubt many of you know how to do. Throw this together with the fact that you'll need some sort of "pay with real money" aspect to maintain your server and pay your programmers, artists, and the like (especially the programmers, seeing as patches are often necessary), even if it means having users pay just to play the game, much like World of Warcraft or City of Heroes. Then you have to moderate everything, so that players don't go screwing up this huge project your team has put together. Let's not forget that you need to actually get publicity for it to work. I highly doubt that a strange MMO that involves inflating women for no other purpose than to provide erotic content to a fairly obscure fetish would succeed among a general audience. There are bigger fetishes that have succeeded with it, however, like the furries, but keep in mind that inflation is heavily dwarfed by furries, including combination fetishes involving furries, furry inflation included. However, I doubt inflation would have a big enough audience to survive, unless you could somehow bring it across in a way that was strictly meant to be non-erotic.

Now, if you can get past the ridiculous costs of making a functional MMO, let's face it. Most successful MMORPG games thrive by getting users to pay for what is effectively nothing in the real world, and often involve endless grinding and/or pressing a button over and over, hoping that your stats are better than your enemies' stats so that you don't die. They generally have little fun factor to them, and are more often just addicting, whether it be for social reasons or, more likely, for the satisfaction of leveling up your character. Most of the time, how "good" you are at the game is almost entirely dependent on how long you've spent playing the game. Some MMO games do offer bits of strategy, but it's usually minimal, seeing as the game puts more emphasis on stats than being able to land careful, sneaky blows or being able to dodge attacks, or being able to attack properly, or whatever case may apply to a game with more bite for its bark than an MMORPG.

Case in point, an MMO game is not only very hard to make, or even make work as far as gameplay goes, but is usually done for monetary purposes, and is rather unrealistic for a single person or small team to make, and they're usually not that great anyways. You'd be better of making an actually innovative and fun game. And if you're new at programming, go with something easier. Yuji Naka programmed the first Sonic the Hedgehog nearly by himself. If he could, you can make a platformer (or simpler) game too. And that was back when games weren't as easy to program as they are today, with simplified languages aimed specifically at game developers, like BlitzMax. If you're going to get a start with programming, do something reasonable. You're not going to be able to recreate WoW as your first program, that's a near guarantee. Be reasonable.