From [url=http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/8533/Can-We-Make-Quests-Matter-Again.html]this article[/url]:

Quote:

One way to use the vast troves of information MMOs collect is to monitor player activity and watch it for signs of action and boredom and use it to control pacing. Left for Dead and Payday 2 use this to great effect to keep a small number of maps feeling fresh and dynamic as an AI “director” works to try and shock and surprise you, at just the right times, with new waves of attacks. I could see using similar algorithms for breaking up the way that dynamic events unfold in MMOs and extend each event’s re-playability. But what if we used our vast computer power and data to do something even more ambitious? What if we could create an AI director that just didn’t control spawn waves, but actually wrote story, lore and quests on the fly?

Narrative Science (www.narrativescience.com) is a company that writes news stories. But unlike most news stories, these are not penned by a hard boiled writer sporting a five o’clock shadow and a dangling a cigarette between his lips, but by an Artificial Intelligence. Narrative Science predicts that in the next 10-15 years, 90% of news may be written by a computer. And it’s good. Good enough that you really can’t tell the AI stories from the human written versions. The computers churn out hundreds of thousands of articles on sports, financial news and other topics using a vast trove of past data and sophisticated AI code. Narrative Science requires a large amount of data to effectively generate its stories…and guess what, MMOs have tons of data.

I am curious to hear what all y'all and MWM's AI people think of this. Limiting this to the mission builder at first sounds logical. However, I think it would be grand if such an AI would eventually be allowed to romp in an entire zone. In my mind, this is what hazard zones were meant to be. What could be more awesome than going into that part of the sewers and never quite knowing what to expect?

His remarks on dynamic content also resonate with me, since in many cases the only 'dynamic' is the randomness of whether the event is on or off (and sometimes not even that). Every respect to Trion for trying it out and pushing dynamic content, but when I tried Rift for a while, the rifts very quickly became an annoyance that I wanted (and in some cases needed) to avoid.