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[JoshuaFH]

Since Servant Corps's set the precedent for talking about an MMO he's imagining, I thought I'd talk about mine too.

This is something I said a while back in a different thread, no one even mentioned it so I felt really discouraged for a long time but I'll bring it back up now.

Alright, that's good. If anyone else wants to chime in with they're opinion or question, go right ahead.

Another idea I'm toying with in my fantasy MMO is the presence of a 'main antagonistic force' that opposes everyone as a whole.

What I mean by this is, the main antagonist will be a giant magically floating castle or island, called the "Sky Kingdom". The Sky Kingdom will float high in the sky and drift across the game world, in complete view of the players (who can't reach it or attack it in any way) mostly doing absolutely nothing. However, sometimes, to spice things up, dragons (or some other powerful creature) will emerge from it and attack towns or roads. The creatures won't leave, they have to be killed.

It's up to the players to watch the Sky Kingdom and defend against it's attacks. To increase the thrill of fighting, sometimes a "Dragon Rider" will come down, which is somebody riding a dragon like a knight, who is much harder to kill, but You can loot his body for his armor and weapons, which would be of a higher quality than normal armor or weapons.

Perhaps every once in a while, the Sky Kingdom can do something really interesting, like create giant Sea Monsters that it drops into the ocean, or lay a curse on a town that makes all the players that die come back as zombies/monsters or some such.

What do you think about that?

Ontop of all this, I was thinking of the game not having monsters that just dropped random items, but just large amount of meat and skin most probably, with only other players and special humanoid enemies dropping gear.

The entire game world would be PvP, so anyone could attack anyone. However, to stop the stronger/smarter players from lording over the weaker players at every turn, very large numbers of NPC's would spawn in every civilized area, which enforce the law of "don't attack other players and stuff like that". So, in theory, you could attack other players in a town, but then you'd have to avoid getting trounced by the 20-30 fairly strong NPC's just wandering around. Greater adventure would exist outside of the civilized area, but you'd have to leave the protective shell of the towns first.

To increase the likelihood of better interaction between players, a voice chat type headset would come with every game. How well someone can hear you is inversely proportional to how close you are to them, so you can hear people better when they are closer to you. There would be no 'whispering' or 'private message' type system, so players would be forced to actually be civil to eachother.

There wouldn't be a level-type system. New players would be nearly as strong as veteran players. Strength would consist of your items, knowledge of the game world, and how many friends you had. Actual friends, not just people on a list.

There wouldn't be small, compact quests that are rehashed for every player, instead, there would be very large intensely difficult quests that the entire playerbase have to try to complete. Like being seiged by the Sky Kingdom that I talked about earlier, Giant bands of pirates start roving the seas and start harassing the players, and island popping up out of the sea with a giant castle full of tough bad guys, stuff like that. This would make the players actions actually mean something, in a sense.

To amplify the "players actually making a difference" feel, players that do awesome stuff, contribute a great deal to the overall good, or just generally make a name for themselves will be written into the game's history.

There would be a crafting system for pretty much everything. Collection of raw materials would, in most cases, be a simple and trivial task that is completed quickly. The spawn points for these materials would be erratic and far away from civilization, so you would have to worry about being attacked by other players.

Almost all items in the game would degrade with use, and players would need to eat, so that would fuel the player economy.

There would also be boats, horses, and wagons, for carrying items and players faster and more safely.

/daydream

[Emperor_Jonathan]

Interesting idea, sounds great, I would play it.

The only gripes to me are logistically. More in-depth story would probably be required, i.e. why are they attacking? etc.

[Servant Corps]

The main reason I made my topic was that I was finding some free webhosts, and the first ideas popped into my mind that I would like to implement had to do with the Tenth Reich, hence why I asked, as a precusor to actually launching a Tenth Reich MMORPG. I wished I made that clear.

[JoshuaFH]

Ah, then I didn't mean to bash your idea SC, I just wanted a reason to write all this out.

and to Jon, I'm not too big on story in MMO's. Perhaps it could be something about the revival of the Sky Kingdom, something about an ancient race, and the players having to deal with it, but from there the story is written by the players.

[Emperor_Jonathan]

Oh yeah, I meant back story.

[Org]

Would there be Multiplayer, like multiple people fighting in one castle?

Woulod there be "classes"? And what are we? Humans? What about there being just "special characters" instead of just dragon riders, like a Pegasus Knight, or a Roc Knight?

[JoshuaFH]

No, there would not be classes or races, as I always thought those were iffy to start with.

and yeah, there'd be more interesting enemies other than just the dragon riders, I just used those as an example.

[Org]

No, there would not be classes or races, as I always thought those were iffy to start with.

and yeah, there'd be more interesting enemies other than just the dragon riders, I just used those as an example.

Ahhh, okay. So we defend? With what?And this sounds fun.

[Yaaga]

Well, it's quite obvious, you defend with what you make! I think this sounds highly open ended, and I definetly think this could/will be an excellent game!

[Yanlin]

As long as there's realistic crafting. For example, a guild could literally build a small outpost to mine and process iron ore into iron bars. They could not realistically start an entire weapons factory on the spot because that would require some logistics. Considering the players actually mine and smelt the iron. Of course, it is much faster to make a weapon than it is to mine it. It would be INSANELY expensive to get such an operation going. As par with real life. But it would be insanely profitable because of this. Free market economy. Let inflation handle itself. But be sure to create money sinks to counteract it.

[Duke 2.0]

 The problem with 'guards' is that there will be high-level players who can and will take them out, unless these 'guards' are angelic guardians protecting the world from griefers.
 Because it would be strange to be able to defeat the lord of the sky castle but unable to take on a few guards.

 My take on an ideal MMO? Well, everybody can learn everything. You want to be a fighter than can throw spells? Fine, go with it. However, ones stat growth and experience gain would depend on their 'schools' and 'jobs'. These are not real jobs, but more like a status that makes specific stats grow faster. Say you take a 'job' at a magic store. Every time you use magic under their school of teaching you would gain more experience to mastering that spell than if a knight of the guards casted a spell.
 Thus classes would grow out of the 'jobs' available. Now you only have a specific amount of time in the day(Not actual time, just for flavor) to take a job, so you cannot enroll to every one and get massive experience buffs. At best you can take a main job as a student somewhere with a side-job at a store somewhere.
 Still, if you want to have a knight that can shoot fireballs you damn well can. It will require grinding that makes Koreans frustrated, but you can do it.

[Errol]

One could also cut away all or at least most NPCs, then, for example, players would have to give out quests if they had to do something, like: getting crafting materials, beating up another player, fetch me an armor, etc. and put up a bounty (money, item). The system could also perhaps give you a number of xp. These quests could be put up at some kind of public board.

A flaw of this is however that this method tends to produce not that much quests, probably has a hole in the lower levels adn could lead to floods of simply unreasonable quests like: Fetch me the +13 Diamond Mail. Reward: 10gp. You'd need some guys to clean these up.

Potential solution: You need to pay a small fee to put up a quest. Works as a moneysink and prevents most questspam.


(disclaimer: The general idea is not actually mine, but shamelessly stolen from a webcomic named Realms of Ishikaze. That webcomic is about a MMORPG which is, most notably, competely devoid of NPCs. All shopkeeps, guildmasters, guards, even the government were actually run by players. Shame you had to pay for 4/5 of the comic.)

[JoshuaFH]

One thing I've never understood is how money in an MMO has any value at all, especially in the ones where there aren't any NPC-run stores.

Money is something that's backed by a government, government is something that usually doesn't exist in an MMO, so how it retains any value seems to be the players stuck in the habit of associating "money = value".

[Duke 2.0]

 Money takes no inventory space and is very fluid.

[Servant Corps]

In Fanasty MMOs, gold is instrinically valuable. Because it's shiny. So, the NPC shopkeepers want it. And if the NPC shopkeepers want it, you want it too, because it's the only way to buy stuff from those NPCs.

But I remember there was one MMO where the gold market was so flodded with gold that the "de facto" currency became jewels or something.

EDIT: Oh wait, you were asking how money would be useful in a game without NPCs?

Well, it would act as a good way to exchange goods without having to engage in the ineffective practice of bartering. If you want a sword, you can just give the guy with the sword $500 instead of going on a fetch quest to get a chicken so you can exchange that for a cow so that you can exchange that for a shield so you can exchange that for a spellbook so that you can exchange that to a ring so that you can finally go to the guy who has the sword, and give the ring to him to get the sword. If you give the guy with the sword $500, the guy can go to the person having the ring, and buy that for $500, thereby saving much time and effort.

The truth is, your players will likely come up with an artibrary currency anyway, so you might as well create one right off the bat so as to get rid of ineffiencies, and if they don't use it, it's okay.

Oh, and government does exist in an MMORPG. The admins serve as the government that prints and guarrante money, and gets to decide how much money gets into the game system (via quests and such). Too much money within the game system, of course, lead to hyperinflation.