These forums becoming unbearable?

[gifthorse]

Since there's nothing new under the sun...

rip off all the good ideas instead of the bad ones.

That's terrible advice LOL. Developers should pretend that no other games exist and then develop their dreams from there, only looking to other games as pragmatists to see how certain things were implemented. They shouldn't look to other games first and then blatantly rip off ideas that they were too unimaginative to think of themselves.

The reason for this is because when developers think of an idea - that's if they think of an idea at all - they are usually limited by the technology at their disposal when implementing it. The first MMOs ever released didn't have the tools that todays developers have, and yet Ultima Online (for example) implemented player-made housing, mount-taming, and many other novel features. They had nothing to look to for inspiration, and that helped them make a good game, based solely on their own imaginations. But their ideas were limited to the technology of the era, and so the idead that implementated were limited. Nowadays, developers have the ability to do better. But they will never be able to do better if they look only at the implementation of the idea and then imitate it rather than reimagine it.