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[Vaiolis]

On the topic of what makes an MMORPG fun, to me personally, exploring. There is nothing I enjoy more in a game than going into an area I've never visited before, or better yet never heard of before, or even better yet, an area that nobody else has ever seen before.

when developement is finished, you might find this interesting

How did you know I love those kind of space games? Thank you very much

[beorn080]

As a person that is genuinely curious, I ask: To you personally, what makes an MMORPG an ideally fun experience?

A by-the-book shadowrun mmorpg, with all crafting skills included.

I like more deadly/cruel mmorpgs, with permadeath (or at least some loss), where a beginner character has a chance of beating a veteran.

Alas, there are no mmorpgs like this so far. Darkfall might come close to it.

I would settle for an MMORPG that isn't based off of D&D or the related d20 games.

Paranoia, now THAT would be a kick ass MMORPG. Everyone starts at the lowest level, yellow I think but I never had an actual rulebook for it to read, and as you do jobs for friend computer, you get higher clearances but greater chances of being suspected for pretty much anything. Would also be able to increase your ranks with the various factions, so if you wanted to stay at the yellow access level, but wanted access to better stuff, you could do jobs for say the mutant faction and get some different gear and such.

Death would be semipermanent, with loss of knowledge(not sure how that would be handled), equipment carried with you, and your access level and faction levels would go down depending on how you died.

Obviously this would require a decent staff to run it, since eventually you need to incriminate your teammates to advance, and I don't think a premade GM program would be able to handle that. Maybe you could, after you finish a mission, be put into a queue or given an appointment for debriefing. Naturally it would behoove you to get as early an appointment as possible so you have less chance of getting fingered, but it wouldn't always be possible.

Edit: Thought of a few other things second I hit reply.

[Servant Corps]

Well, since I know about PARANOIA, the clearance system is organized on the color spectrum.
INFRARED
RED
ORANGE
YELLOW
GREEN
BLUE
INDIGO
VIOLET
ULTRAVIOLET

The INFRARED workers are just the masses, usually seen working at the food vats. Troubleshooters start off at Red Clearance, being promoted from INFRARED.

There has been attempts over at Paranoia-Live to create a PARANOIA MMORPG, but so far, none has been made yet. The rights to make a PARANOIA MMORPG is currently owned by Skotos, but, well, erm, they aren't making it yet. So any attempt by the playerbase to make a PARANOIA MMORPG...well...

EDIT: There are three ways I can see a PARANOIA MMORPG be made, at the moment.
--A MUD project. Project is inactive.
--A "Living Campagin", like in D&D. All the PARANOIA games are conducted on the Internet using the JPar client. The PARANOIA games, each run by a GM, has effects on one another.
--The TRIS system, as adversited in the Forum Games section, has the potential to allow for a 'MUD' to be scripted...assuming it's ever done.

[beorn080]

I'm not sure what the case is there. There are posts from a couple months ago, but the latest download is over 4 years old.

[Servant Corps]

I'm not sure what the case is there. There are posts from a couple months ago, but the latest download is over 4 years old.

The PARANOIA-LIVE forum is in fact very active. The latest download still works, altough there is an attempt to create a new PARANOIA client, the latest download still suffices (altough I can't get it to run). In fact, right now, there is a small discussion over PARANOIA right now in those forums.

Er, speaking of which. On those forums, there is in fact a PARANOIA forum game (that is also very active), where you start off as a RED person. It may not be the MMORPG you dream of, but it's there.

[beorn080]

I'm not saying I dream of a PARANOIA MMORPG, merely mentioned it since it would have semipermadeath with the clones, plenty of PVP, a player driven storyline, and communists. Would prefer that over the constant "you are a member of (insert random fantasyey faction here), go out and save the world with your +5 dagger of ogre slaying. But first I need you to kill some snakes coming out of the baker's toilet."

[Puck]

OMG a proper paranoia mmo would be hilarious. Character life expectancy of a few days, if even  With permadeath, alright.

Tell you what, everybody and their grandmother is used to fluffy wow carebear land, no way you can sell a game like paranoia AND ask for a monthly fee. sadly. If it would even be able to survive it would be a very small niche game, or it would have to be dumbed down and overly simplified and they would need to remove all it's sharp edges.

Sucks, really, but the average mmo customer just wants to see numbers go up, never down. (Unless snow moose count, ofc)

[Servant Corps]

Well, each Troubleshooter has 6 clones, and will be able to buy extra clone packs for a small fee and a chance of receiving some...er...genetic problems (which will cost money to fix, of course). So, it's not really permadeath, at least until Friend Computer gets convinced you have committed treason and erases your entire clone line.

[beorn080]

I think you could get away with it by giving say clones per day based on access level. So you can start out as a red level guy with 1 clone per day. So you can die once a day when red without permadeath, but if you die a second time you have to reroll. As you go up and the risk increases, you get additional clones, or maybe faster cloning. So when you hit violet level you get 3 clones on a 12 hour cycle. That allows more risk to be attempted without totally destroying lets say a month of work. Since as a violet you are more likely to be killed, you get access to faster cloning vats so you can find the commie that killed you, but you still aren't immortal.

Of course, I don't think it would be about the numbers. AFAIK, having never actually read a PARANOIA rulebook, there aren't levels in a D&D sense, but higher level access levels give better equipment, but not always the manual to use it. Would definately need active GMs to keep the RPing going though.

[Puck]

Well, each Troubleshooter has 6 clones, and will be able to buy extra clone packs for a small fee and a chance of receiving some...er...genetic problems (which will cost money to fix, of course). So, it's not really permadeath, at least until Friend Computer gets convinced you have committed treason and erases your entire clone line.

Alright, it has been 15 years since I toyed around with paranoia, I didnt know you can buy more clones.

But I DO know that it's supposed to be the hardest most unforgiving son of a bitch universe, where money for the player is really scarce, and the computer thinks you commited treason basically... all the time. I thought the gamemaster was supposed to design the missions the computer gives you in a way that you HAVE to commit treason in some way.

Basically... at the "accept mission Y/N" choice, each answer should ALREADY imply treason  every little step should leave the bitter taste of "omfg, im SO screwed"

[qwertyuiopas]

What about, although I still know next to nothing, when you run out of clones and die, the computer will give you another clone at the cost of you being demoted an access level each time. Also, have an access level below infra red where players are physically restricted to the mindless grinding areas where they can't get hurt, but allow them to advance out of it quickly(say within an hour of work or a 12 hours of time logged off) so that they don't want to die, but don't lose everything if they just get unlucky. More advanced players should still have access to these areas, since you could get something out of them(think minimum wage/10) but with tons of grinding for little profit it encourages players to seek out better alternatives. Then again, it could ba the fallback career is the interesting professions were attacked, since it would be in a secure, protected area. Also, the dull jobs would leave room for sabotage

Another thing that would be a good idea, and I don't know if it is in the official rules, would be clone quality so an ultraskilled player would only have decent skills if they were demoted back to nothing and would have to earn their way back up the promotion scale to gain the full benefits. Combined with a form of slow skill decay(1%/day you aren't good enough to get them?) and you get a good incentive to not run out of clones but running out would not be game-crippling in any way.

Of course, all of that would work best with a clones-per-day system.

[Servant Corps]

Well, in the newest version of PARANOIA, there are three different PARANOIA 'styles': ZAP, CLASSIC, and STRAIGHT. STRAIGHT is the least 'lethal' of the playing styles, so I don't really think you need a clones-per-day system (since you aren't going to lose clones every single second). Instead of executing everybody for treason, there are other ways of punishment within the newest version of PARANOIA, including Censure, Medictation, and Brainscrubbing (the last one can remove a couple of skills in the process).

Yeah, having an active GM staff to run the PARANOIA mmorpg would be good. But I'm not volunteering. :p

[Yanlin]

Just thought I should mention it, as with a quick search it was only mentioned once in the forum, and not in Other Games. Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is a fairly impressive MMO. You can go the usual combat way, fighting everything, and all that. But you never have to be great at combat to have fun. There's plenty of crafting, and if I remember correctly, every item in the game can be crafted. The crafting process is actually pretty nice too; you get a set certain number of points, which are mostly spent doing necessary tasks, such as sawing the wood, piecing things together, but you could also polish the item, sand it (when dealing with wood at least), and thus increase its quality, from F to A. And of course, when you first start out, getting above a D is near impossible, as all the necessary tasks used up all of your time, hehe. There's also crafting that deals with larger constructions, where you can build your own homes. I think you can even make villages or cities, probably only if you join a guild though, but I won't delve into that, as I'm not sure. You can even make ships.

There's also a Diplomacy way, where you can, well, self-explanatory. Talk with others to incite them for war, persuade, or just get on their nerves, with logic or otherwise. The whole diplomacy thing is played in a card-game, where a card that you play is the communication technique you use. It's been a while since I played, so I can't remember too much about how the card game works.

But yeah. Very large world, so large that characters can go into "Caravan Mode," where they automatically go offline and can't come back online for 8 hours or something, but in the meantime their characters follow the party leader, so that only he/she has to make a great trek across the land. Once again, long time since I've played, and I never used it, so not sure how great it is.

The biggest problem(s) I had with it were the character's faces, which look like old dolls, and that it costs twenty dollars USD to play per month, which is more than most MMO's that I've heard of. In fact, if it weren't for such a high monthly subscription I'd probably still be playing it.


On the topic of what makes an MMORPG fun, to me personally, exploring. There is nothing I enjoy more in a game than going into an area I've never visited before, or better yet never heard of before, or even better yet, an area that nobody else has ever seen before. In Vanguard, at least when I played (a week or two after it came out) new places were discovered often, so there were always new things to be seen, as it was a new MMO. I'm guessing by today pretty much every place has been found though. But yeah, exploration and discovery.

This Vanguard?

[beorn080]

Just thought I should mention it, as with a quick search it was only mentioned once in the forum, and not in Other Games. Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is a fairly impressive MMO. You can go the usual combat way, fighting everything, and all that. But you never have to be great at combat to have fun. There's plenty of crafting, and if I remember correctly, every item in the game can be crafted. The crafting process is actually pretty nice too; you get a set certain number of points, which are mostly spent doing necessary tasks, such as sawing the wood, piecing things together, but you could also polish the item, sand it (when dealing with wood at least), and thus increase its quality, from F to A. And of course, when you first start out, getting above a D is near impossible, as all the necessary tasks used up all of your time, hehe. There's also crafting that deals with larger constructions, where you can build your own homes. I think you can even make villages or cities, probably only if you join a guild though, but I won't delve into that, as I'm not sure. You can even make ships.

There's also a Diplomacy way, where you can, well, self-explanatory. Talk with others to incite them for war, persuade, or just get on their nerves, with logic or otherwise. The whole diplomacy thing is played in a card-game, where a card that you play is the communication technique you use. It's been a while since I played, so I can't remember too much about how the card game works.

But yeah. Very large world, so large that characters can go into "Caravan Mode," where they automatically go offline and can't come back online for 8 hours or something, but in the meantime their characters follow the party leader, so that only he/she has to make a great trek across the land. Once again, long time since I've played, and I never used it, so not sure how great it is.

The biggest problem(s) I had with it were the character's faces, which look like old dolls, and that it costs twenty dollars USD to play per month, which is more than most MMO's that I've heard of. In fact, if it weren't for such a high monthly subscription I'd probably still be playing it.


On the topic of what makes an MMORPG fun, to me personally, exploring. There is nothing I enjoy more in a game than going into an area I've never visited before, or better yet never heard of before, or even better yet, an area that nobody else has ever seen before. In Vanguard, at least when I played (a week or two after it came out) new places were discovered often, so there were always new things to be seen, as it was a new MMO. I'm guessing by today pretty much every place has been found though. But yeah, exploration and discovery.

Three big images clipped.

Other then that first one, all those would make great additions to a game.

"You failed diplomacy. All future spot checks now have a -10 penalty for loss of an eye."

[Mephansteras]

Vanguard has apparently been improved a lot in the last year, so it may be worth checking out again.