First published on 2/25/2010
Combat ... the common coin of the World of Warcraft, Hyperborea and Gor Evolved.
A fellow showed up on the Gorums saying that he was working with a well-heeled company that was interested in developing a pay-for-play virtual world (think World of Warcraft) that would include adult content (think Second Life, thought it is a freebie world, not pay for play). He asked for suggestions, which sparked some thinking on my part, which I'll share with you, because I'm such a nice guy.
You should really look at Gor Evolved (which you apparently did not do) if you want to really assess the potential of Gor for helping populate your virtual world. One of the advantages you cite would be HUGELY popular for Gor Extended players, who typically engage in the dreaded combat thing much more often than BtB players, which is ... no lag. SL Gor fights between huge groups with dozens of players participating typically result in arrows hanging in the air in rows. If your lag solution fixes that, and I'm pretty sure it would, you'd have a huge advantage over SL Gor right there alone.
The ablity to have 1000 avatars on a single sim would be good too. Right now we don't KNOW how big battles in Gor Extended might be because sims typically can't handle more than 60 players at a swat (as the BtB guys how often their battles ... hell, their ANYTHINGS ... bump up against sim limits on the number of players). I can see battles with hundreds of players that last for hours. Tremendous fun for me and the despised "pew-pewers" I think.
And because of its greater emphasis on combat, and on it's better range of roles for women (i.e., female warriors, not permitted in the more tradional Gorean sims) Gor evolved is likely a more productive source of new players from outside Gor. I'm thinking about World of Warcraft (WoW) here. It has eleven million players I understand. I imagine that every months tens of thousands of WoW players think, "Damn, I'm getting bored with WoW and all the other games out there ... I mean, I still like the fighting, but I wish there was more to it."
Sexy slavegirls, the common coin of Hyperborea and SL Gor. That would amount to "more to it," wouldn't it?
Well, what they are thinking about is what Gor Evolved IS. If you can communicate that to WoW players somehow, you might have a conduit that could pump thousands of new players to your world every month, and there's nothing WoW can do about it, because they have to keep that youth market. Your world could sort of "harvest" the WoW players as they mature.
Now an original thought. Why do Gor? Why not do something like the Hyborean world described in the "Savage Sword of Conan" comics? Slavery is rampant in that world, Goreans slavegirls, Masters, Mistresses and such would fit quite naturally into it. I wrote a long article about the Hyborean Age's Gorlike aspects at one time, and came to following conclusion:
The thing about Savage Sword of Conan other than being damn good in and of itself, is that all the elements were there to make it a Gorean-in-everything-but-name comic (as it is, it's damn close to being that). All it would have taken is a little more focus on bondage where the slavegirls are concerned.
My point is, Goreans could live very easily in the Hypborean Age, taking roles as slavegirls, warriors, free women and such that are pretty much the same as their roles in Gor, and you wouldn't have to fight all the prejudice against Gor that now exists. Frankly I think Goreans have a better feel for roleplaying barbarians than anyone else, because they alone have dared to play roles that run counter to modern ideas concerning egalitarianism, sexism, slavery, etc.
You could follow Alice's idea of creating a new land that didnt have any copyright entanglements very easily in such a situation, because much of what Howard laid down in his Conan stories has become generic. Wouldn't be hard to create a Hyperborea-in-another-name because there are a huge number of such places already.
In fact, you might want to consider creating a Gor continent and linking it to a Hyperborean continent. The distance between Cimmeria and Torvaldsland is just not that great, just as the distance between Aquilonia and Ar is not that great.
From the guy's response to my post, he's not interested. Tsk, tsk. I have a tendency to be right about these things.
