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[Urist McDetective]

Has anyone played Natural Selection? Think about how the Marines (whatever they're called ... I haven't played in a long time) work with their commander. I wouldn't personally want it for DF, but it could work ... somehow. Remember DF Adventure mode and how there are plans to let you go about building, mining, etc?

[thobal]

You know what I think everytime anyone brings up the topic of MMOs?

"X-COM:Apocalypse, X-COM:Apocalypse, X-COM:Apocalypse."

[(name here)]

short answer: no
long answer: noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Real long answer: Strategy MMOs are just bad by nature. full stop.

Also, lag.


X-com apocalypse might make for a decent shooter MMO, actually.

[Chromie]

but there's a reason why there's only 1 really phenominally successful MMO

Yeah WoW. I am surprised that it's STILL so popular. Class balance was bad pre TBC and in TBC also, now it's just plain horrible. Sure, the PvE content is still very diverse and huge, but pretty much that's it.

Well, they are constantly working to improve existing features and make things more balanced, rather than just adding in new ones all the time.  It's much less of a pain to level up now, for example.

Not to start a fist shaking yellwar, but THIS UNNAMED COMPANY is allowing players to get from 0 to top level faster and faster, basically so no one points out that the low-level zones have been abandoned unfinished, and are in some places terribly designed and no fun.

I mean, would you want someone to hand you a near-completed fort, and just allow you to pull the FLOOD THE WORLD WITH MAGMA lever? No. The fact that the company is acknowledging that 2/3 of their game sucks and is hated by their playerbase just makes my lower my head to my desk with force repeatedly.

[Iden]

Click the link in my signature. (No, really! It's relevant!)

[Fensfield]

Well, my bit...

While I recognise that a true MMO-game style DF might never work, something for the far future I would love to see is what someone mentioned last page, wherein players merely upload their play-data after each session, and download each time they resume.

I mean, even a siege would be easily handled that way.  Server tells client, for instance, 'you're being sieged, here's the data'.  From there the client just generates a siege based on what the attacking player threw at the defending player.

I have to laugh at people that just arbitrarily declare the idea of online DF stupid.  Yes, it's unlikely, yes, it's very likely to be unworkable as a true MMO, but what's really stupid is ignoring the possibility of limited online features improving the DF experience.

I mean hell, why not be a bit less ambitious?  Why not just have one world, with two players able to chuck world updates at one another as described above, thus playing in the same world and interacting with each other like some play-by-mail chess game.  You could even spoof a more MMO/online play-like experience by having the client take regular (every ten minutes?) images of the game being played, and give them to the person/s you're playing with, for their client to apply to their world in turn.

In effect, the above idea is basically just in-client support for a community fortress style game, but allowing more than one fortress in the same world.  In other words, yeah again, Way down the road, but still avoiding a complete rework of the basic game and its workings where a true MMO/online DF would.

*checks out above poster's link*

[Sowelu]

The reason that people declare it stupid is because it's been discussed SO MUCH, and literally all of these ideas have been shot down one way or another--except for the "send someone a siege" option, that one is considered kind of neat.

The main obstacle to the 'send a siege' is that all critters in DF exist as a part of that region, and you'd have to chop that part off of the new siegers.  It could work, but it's dramatically -sideways- from where DF is headed at present.  DF has its mission statements, and multiplayer isn't anywhere in those.  DF is heavily planned out in terms of cores and reqs and stuff; multiplayer just isn't anywhere in the plan.

PBEM on the other hand is pretty demonstrably not fun.  It's not even hard to see why.  Look at community games, how often do people fail to take their turn on time?  At least 1/4 of the time on anything long running.  So you can't guarantee that people will keep playing.  What do you do then?  You can't stop the game to wait for them.  But you get all kinds of problems if one player was depending on another's exports, etc.  What happens if you send an army to a player who quits?

Also what if two players have radically different FPSes and goals?  One's making a megaconstruction on a massive 50-z-level waterfall, so they go a season a day if they're lucky; the other is in a 2x2 area.

SimCity 4 played around with an online PBEM feature, where a bunch of players would take part in massive region games.  They just had to accept that each player ran at a different speed...SC4 was built for that, you could play one year in one city, a hundred in its neighbor, then come back to the first city and it's still just a year in.  I can't see how DF could possibly work like that.  People, artifacts, etc. couldn't easily be shuttled around...Constructing new sites to bring new players in would be difficult...

Essentially it would be a re-imagining of DF from the ground up, and it would be simpler, it would be lacking a lot of DF's detail.  It wouldn't have a lot of what makes DF DF.

So, I think you would more want to make a new game from scratch.

ok so it's a bad idea, still, i have in all the pc's glory, power, and history i have yet to see an RTS MMO that isn't some website. personally i think dwarf fortress would be an excellent choice to be the first.

This is because RTSes are competitive, and very speed based.  Over time you become powerful enough to squish everything, you exploit all resources around you, and then you hope you're stronger than the other player.  How could this possibly be fun?  Even heavily economy based RPGish MMOs tend to blow--I've played some online games where you can fairly easily set up a large base, but then you end up dominating everyone around you who doesn't have one...

The only way I could see a "multiple unit MMO" being any fun is if it was a small squad that follows normal MMO rules, IE, no permadeath, not generally growing in size.

Uh oh.  X-Com Apocalypse the MMO, where you can control around 6 or 8 people in real time tactical.  I think thobal is on to something.

[Folly]

My proposal for an online system completely negated nearly all of the issues you mentioned. It would require extremely minimal modification of the existing client. All that would need to be altered is getting an world image from the server instead of generating it yourself, uploading your own fortress data at the end of each session, and allowing for sieges to be generated from military's of other fortresses in addition to the existing NPC civ sieges.
Basically I'm proposing a PBeM system played by dozens or even hundreds of different players. It doesn't matter if a few stop playing, because there are still tons of other players who keep going and new ones joining all the time.
Differing FPS's are a non-issue since each player plays independently.

The only real problem is that it's not one of Toady's priorities...but isn't that what the suggestion board is for?

[praguepride]

What your proposing sounds a lot like the Spore system. Players don't actually "interact" with each other, but their content is uploaded and downloaded as needed from an online server.

And you know what happened? Everyone's worlds suddenly became swarmed with penis and vagina monsters.

Multiplayer is HIGHLY overrated because the majority of people are 'tards

[Folly]

So...you're saying that if this idea is implemented, we'll end up with a bunch of giant phallic fortresses? And we'll be attacked by dwarves with erotic names, weilding weapons that have been given confusing yet stimulating designations?
Well hell...that's a risk I'm willing to take for the fun of participating in an online dwarf world.

Yeah, what I'm proposing is basically the same system Spore has, except people would share their custom fortresses instead of custom creatures. Though now that I think of it Spore did have a building editor...but DF's building editor is way more fun and interactive.
The most important distinction is that players could actually compete for territory. Form an alliance and build a few fortresses in an area, and anyone who tries to settle nearby will be overwhelmed with constant dwarf raids from the first season. This would give players incentive to play in more desolate, isolated, and dangerous areas just to avoid the pressure from other fortresses.
Gradually expand your borders with new fortresses, eventually applying pressure on other nations, all as part of your gradual plan to take over the world!
Of course since players can't be wiped out if they don't play, a minimum of 1 game-year played per real-month would have to be instituted with penalty of having your fortress auto-abandon if you don't play.

[Footkerchief]

My proposal for an online system completely negated nearly all of the issues you mentioned. It would require extremely minimal modification of the existing client. All that would need to be altered is getting an world image from the server instead of generating it yourself, uploading your own fortress data at the end of each session, and allowing for sieges to be generated from military's of other fortresses in addition to the existing NPC civ sieges.

Are you envisioning armies that just disappear from the attacker's fortress and reappear at the siege destination several weeks later, instead of traveling over the world map and encountering things?

[praguepride]

@Folly: I guarentee you that by the second week you'll be sick and tired of sieging up the urethra entrance of my penis-fort!

[Folly]

The exact traveling mechanics are best left for Toady to work out.
However the attacking dwarves would never actually disappear from anywhere, not for the clients or for the server. They would just be flagged as unable to attack again for a year, on the client of the defending player.

[Pilsu]

I think this recent overhype of MMOs is related to the sad sacks desperately wanting to make or pretend to have friends, not about the multiplayer itself being worth crap. Not that it ever works, people like that being anchored to the game itself

[Footkerchief]

The exact traveling mechanics are best left for Toady to work out.
However the attacking dwarves would never actually disappear from anywhere, not for the clients or for the server. They would just be flagged as unable to attack again for a year, on the client of the defending player.

The exact traveling mechanics are actually pretty crucial.  Devil is in the details as always.  Specifically, your "only upload at the end of each session" thing would not work for any of the army stuff beyond the current placeholder sieges.