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[Shoku]

WANRING: HUGE WALL OF TEXT

Ok, he's my idea of the perfect MMO recipe (taking from previously stated ideas plus my own):


-100% modifiable world.

Are you just going to allow people to graffiti the landscape into a series of dicks?

-Aging, hunger, thirst, etc... also similar to Wurm and Haven & Hearth and Fairy Tale Online.

Carrying that stuff around is tedious. Wow's popular because they don't make you worry about it.
How about only having to worry about food and water when you go a certain distance away from where it's easily accessible? This would also help with the keeping the world relatively unexplored and allow for taking up cartography jobs and such.

body hitpoints

k

play created content

This seems like the quest system would end up being the management nightmare version of an economy -_-;

Analog skill instead of digital

Did anybody like the progression system in final fantasy 2? -_-;
Having no solid cap but just slowing progress down to a crawl beyond a point encourages ultragrinding like you'd see with the people on Maple Story who everyone was pretty sure were three Chinese people logging on in shifts.

randomly generated items

So are we talking the little variations to items like you saw in Disgaea?

learn crafts via experimentation

And how do you keep players from just writing up a cookbook and distributing it within their guild or to the whole internet?

Magic via experimentation

Same thing.
...you know what ragnarok online did? You had to get several pieces of a particular equipment and then take them to a blacksmith to upgrade them with a chance of the item being destroyed. This made a +11 item really hot stuff but getting it was also extremely grindy. You just going to limit players doing this stuff by making it resource expensive or limiting how much they can get done in a day?

-Randomly generated HUGE world.

It's a bad idea to make it take a long time for a group of players to reach the same location in the world though. You should definitely give them a speedy form of travel so if they want to do something at a designated location they can get there quickly or possibly instantly.

Important resources

How much do you want to reward players that can exploit scarcity? I know most of the MMO wealth I get comes from exploiting how much I can get people to pay and that if I were devoted and got into the game early on that it would be a world issue.
Or just look at how the economy of star wars galaxies went with a lot of professions that relied on someone else being impossible to learn because all the easy to make generic stuff cost the fortune you make at high levels instead of being appropriately low level priced. The only reason for that was that people knew they could make more money than that and if someone tried to sell things at a reasonable price it was easy for a price gouger to buy them up and sell them for a proffit without even having done the work of making them.

-Herding, hunting, farming, fishing, etc...

So the tedious trouble of keeping food and water around AND players can price gouge because everyone needs food? Ouch.

-No ultimate item/material/whatever. Rock paper scissor materials

So will there be a way for players to investigate the opponents in an area other than going in with what is probably the wrong equipment or just carrying a packmule worth of armor all the time?

Now for the disclaimer: I do not believe such a game would ever be made, atleast not before we have quantum computers to run it and positronic brain AIs to help us make and manage it. And even if it WAS possible to make it, it would NEVER work as an MMO like WoW or others, because of the incredible emphasis on metagamming in these communities.

You just need to plan for those players. They're not going to the effort of turning the economy into their money making machine and finding the fastest way to level up because those things are enjoyable activities they would rather do than play the game how you intend.

Wikis would pop with theories on combat, item crafting, maps of the world, etc... within days of its opening. The only way it would work was with strictly enforced RP and with a small community (relative to other MMOs), like Fairy Tale Online is doing.

Actually for every question I've asked I've already thought up some answers (Ok, only most of them.) For the crafting you could keep the same procedure from having identical results between players except if somebody went through a long process of apprenticing another player in the craft. It would take some tweaking to keep it from being abused but seeing as playing together with a friend is usually more enjoyable than running around alone* you could actually make it less efficient time wise if the actual process wasn't very grind-y.

And a flat cap on learning per day seems like a bad idea both in terms of gaming and immersion. Instead it should be more like how you describe skillups in general where going beyond the cap started taking much more time. This would reward consistent work while also letting the obsessively dedicated to progress faster (and potentially taking care of how those people probably have more money as well.)

Nevertheless, I deeply hope somebody manages to make this game or a similar one in this century.

Actually I think once procedural generation starts making strides into fulfilling it's potential a lot of this stuff will become pretty common pretty quick.

Err, sorry for the huge post. I didn't know you were planning to reply to every single point of every single post, so I just went into rant-mode Also, I didn't intend that post to be a guide to what kind of game I'd like to play, it's the list of what would be the PERFECT game IMO. From what I'm reading, your MyWorld is still the kind of game I'd play.

Well, yeah. If we do make this, it'll be awesome (MyWorld). But, because it's 2D, it may scare off a large portion of the audience (Impressionable 12 year olds and incomprehensive fools).
So, a Wiki-game-destroyer-pedia may not become too much of a problem. Mind you,  you say a small community, yet DF is small (compared to many) and it has a Wiki filled with hacks and tips. Oh well.
Good post, man.

I don't mind 2D graphics at all. And scaring off the 'Impressionable 12 year olds and incomprehensive fools' is a huge bonus, it makes other people (including me) enjoy the game more!

So yeah, good luck on your game

No worries on the post size; it was the most useful one, and i was more laughing out of exasperation than beating off out of anger. (lol?).

but yeah; losing the nuggetheads is a good thing. They're the guys who make being a mod in a game = UURRGGHHHish.

If you apply a little noise to a simple diminishing returns formula you can keep people from figuring out how to manipulate the system right up till you hit the elitist metagamers who compile ridiculous amounts of data on their forum to work out how formulas behave- and you need quite a population before they'll go to the trouble.

As for maps, I think you should look into developing a map generator.  No matter how pretty your 2D maps are, they can still be broken down into component parts: towns, shops, roads, trees, mountains, walls, and tilesets.  Ultimately, it comes down to: checkpoints, obstacles, groups, events, and graphics.

You don't understand, i'm not using tiles. I'm using brushes in Paintshop, and that's it. Sure, I may make them into tiles, to make the process faster, but it generally looks alright.
For example, a wall. 3 tiles high, but nothing special as it goes horizontal.
Another example would be, a road. It won't be using squares, it'll go along without even thinking about tiles.

So afterward you draw a few invisible lines over top for where people can or can't walk?

But in this sense, every player is their own GM.

There there's no reason to build in anything but an avatar that can move around- people can just RP taking whatever kind of damage and getting hungry and so on in whatever style they prefer.

Oh, but that doesn't make for a very interesting game- there's no advantage playing GM in the game over playing GM in some chatroom- and we'd probably just end up playing tacticus:pantshelm anyway; anyone would when everyone is a GM. Anyone who wants to put something with a degree of quality to it together would have to do it in private and that defeats the point of an MMO.

Sure there are people that play alone instead of in a group but even they still want to be playing around other people, just not so much in a group with them.

Dark text with the Darkling theme in this forum is baaaad.

Anyway, someone said Everquest was permadeath.  Nope.  However, you did drop all your items where you died and had to go back for it.  If you jumped in lava, you were screwed.

Permadeath done right would be a good thing.  Personally, I think a step in that direction would be to have time based permadeath.  If you die 4 times in a 24 hour period, you lose... or something along those lines.  Perhaps a timed resurrection period or a fight to regain your soul from the underlings who took it from you.  I know UO did ghosts, but it would be similar to this and WoW's death march.  You could even build that into the skill trees or world makeup with passages between the  planes.  Players that traverse the inverse (or "death") worlds.  Players could see each other in these parallel universes.  Players in the under-world would appear like black cloudy wisps to the over-world and alternatively players in the overworld would look like white wisps.  Each world could have it's own quests and story.  If done properly, the buildings could even reflect a difference in appearance as opposed to just texture.

My perfect MMO however would have no long distant teleports.  Short distance absolutely could be used for navigating chasms in dungeons and such, but in order to maintain regionalized economies and trade you're going to have to plan your get togethers a little better and make sure people work their way to events beforehand.  Factions would need to play a big role like they did in EQ further enhancing the idea of regionalizing the world.  Traders would have to work their faction up to be able to trade freely and players would have to seek out black markets for items that belong to rival factions.

How about just no teleport style travel for materials instead? In fact this could be a whole explanation for why your gear would be "soulbound."

And for convenience stuff you didn't want to lose could be shoved off into a little pocket dimension you just had to return to to claim or maybe even just teleported back to town if that wasn't too imbalanced & exploitable. Or have both present with the pocket dimension for short teleports and sending it back to base if they take a long enough trip that it would have been faster to just haul it.

A note about being rewarded regularly: Of course gaining skill in something would reward you. However, it is the regularly thing that needs to be taken into consideration. Working towards skills should have mini-rewards upon the way other than working ones way towards 100% effectiveness, as well as such rewards generally coming relatively quickly.

 Basically, one would have mini-advances in a skill at the later levels of it that would provide small assistance to minor things like related skills and mini-skills. So say you have a skill with ten levels. The first advancement would come in ten minutes work. Each level up would double that requirement. At the end three hours of work will be needed to finish the skill, and a total of 5120 minutes or 85 hours.
 Wait, really 85 hours?
 *Checks math*
 Alright, I know that number can't be right.  Still, quite some time. My proposal is that during those spaces between awards(The 'level ups') there would be smaller rewards. Where the larger ones might award a 10% increase in efficiency, the smaller ones could add 1% in smaller skills over smaller requirements. Those three hours work would be filled with ten smaller 'level ups' which award small little bonuses, as to make such grinding less tedious.

 Basically, every hour of work should result in some reward for the player. Even if that reward is small, players should always feel they are accomplishing something.

If you wanted to control how much grinding they did but also get them working on it frequently you could have the reward come into effect the next day but overexertion would diminish it to the point it ended up even being a penalty that would be rather expensive to work through (though still allowing for more total progress while being a large money sink to keep the economy balanced with power gamers around.)

[Vactor]

I'm glad you liked my "no level caps" idea.  I thought of it while watching someone play World of Warcraft at level 60('twas 3 years ago, that was the cap), and commenting about running into monsters that were higher than his level, and thinking "why?"

It pretty much went from there.  To facilitate players who can access unlimited potential, the world has to have an equally unlimited potential, meaning that as you travel further in a given direction, generated enemies will get more powerful, and to take some of the load off of the Devs, player-built equipment should be important.

I also like the idea of adding fashion sense into an MMO.  Just because I don't have any doesn't mean it shouldn't exist :p

Another major advantage I think it has is that it theoretically eliminates the "grind to level cap," and keeps the game new.  That's one reason I never picked up Guildwars.  Sure, it has no subscription fees, but I couldn't stomach the level cap.

Of course, it could do exactly the opposite.  I think no player levels but uncapped skill levels is a nice compromise.

As for maps, I think you should look into developing a map generator.  No matter how pretty your 2D maps are, they can still be broken down into component parts: towns, shops, roads, trees, mountains, walls, and tilesets.  Ultimately, it comes down to: checkpoints, obstacles, groups, events, and graphics.

There are 2 big flaws that come to mind with the idea of no level caps/learn any skill systems, (as this is to be an actual game not just a theory):

1.  Forever Behind:

If there is an unreachable limit (infinite or realistically impossible)to how far a character can advance in a particular skill, the players who start playing will forever have an advantage over any new player who joins.  Few will want to join a game that they know they will always be disadvantaged.  The concept of level caps gives people an endpoint that they can work towards, once they arrive at that point they feel as if they are now in a competitive position.

2. The New Max:

If there is NOT an unreachable limit, i.e. progression is in any way finite in particular skills, or gear is used to add additional range of advancement, the limit of skills and the best gear in game becomes the effective level cap in everything but name.  In this case you aren't getting away from having a level cap, you're just diluting character diversity.  Adding additional skills/gear only increases the amount of effort that is required to be endgame material.

[Sowelu]

"Forever Behind" isn't a tremendous issue if you can work harder to gain skill faster (ie NOT EVE ONLINE), and it's also not a tremendous issue if there's diminishing returns involved (Okay, I have three years, that guy has four years, he's got 5% more hit points than me, BFD).  Diminishing returns is kind of cool anyway, because you can start to feel endgamey pretty quick, you just have to be awesome to keep up.  And hey, "Awesome I got another hit point, that's two this week!" isn't that bad...

[Andir]

The part I hate about all these conversations is that everyone feels that 100% of the game should be accessible to everyone.  The ideal MMO is one you will never see everything so you always have something to achieve.

[bjlong]

The problem of forever behind is put off if you make the crappy fighters/equipment/whatever still in demand. For example, if every suit of armor comes from a PC armorsmith, then even the not-as-good armorsmiths could make money. Quantity versus quality, in short. The functions for crafting should be noisy, too, with different peaks for different qualities according to some techniques in crafting.

As for food etc., this deserves a look. Cities could require certain amounts of food for the PC to not need rations of his/her own, and pay good money for them. PC rations are an excellent idea as long as the hunger system isn't demanding or annoying. The key is to make PC farming be fun and exciting.

As far as long range travel and other stuff goes, please remember that we should be able to play this game in 1 hr. increments at the least, and 24 hr powergaming segments should be discouraged.

Scarcity exploits should definitely be looked at. One way to look at this is by adding in taxes, restrictive limits on carrying capacity, and more making scarce resources pay out slower, and the pay not last as long. This might encourage the formation of "companies" or what-have-you to exploit this resource.

[Volfram]

1.  Forever Behind:
If there is an unreachable limit (infinite or realistically impossible)to how far a character can advance in a particular skill, the players who start playing will forever have an advantage over any new player who joins.  Few will want to join a game that they know they will always be disadvantaged.  The concept of level caps gives people an endpoint that they can work towards, once they arrive at that point they feel as if they are now in a competitive position.

I had considered that.  That's partly why I think no levels and uncapped skill levels is a nice median.

Azkanan: it's still possible to do spline-vertex-based world creation, it's just trickier.  I found a program that did city generation dynamically, allowing the user to choose a few checkpoints and settings and going from there, but I don't remember where it is right now...

[Sowelu]

Ah, right--It is important to figure out how many hours you want it to take someone to see all the content, and how many hours you expect people to play per day/month.  Of course there will always be some people who play TOO MUCH, but not much you can do for that.

Puzzle Pirates is a good example of a game you can hop on and play for a very short amount of time if you want--if you hire onto a boat, you can do jobs and expect to get into and back out of a ship-to-ship fight within 15-30 minutes, and then hey, you can log off if you want, you made money.  Of course the expensive stuff needs a lot of playing to get...  OTOH, a player can SEE all content without necessarily HAVING it.  Sure you can crew on that big boat, but you don't own one, etc.

[ductape]

WANRING: HUGE WALL OF TEXT

Ok, he's my idea of the perfect MMO recipe (taking from previously stated ideas plus my own):


-100% modifiable world.

Are you just going to allow people to graffiti the landscape into a series of dicks?

-Aging, hunger, thirst, etc... also similar to Wurm and Haven & Hearth and Fairy Tale Online.

Carrying that stuff around is tedious. Wow's popular because they don't make you worry about it.
How about only having to worry about food and water when you go a certain distance away from where it's easily accessible? This would also help with the keeping the world relatively unexplored and allow for taking up cartography jobs and such.

body hitpoints

k

play created content

This seems like the quest system would end up being the management nightmare version of an economy -_-;

Analog skill instead of digital

Did anybody like the progression system in final fantasy 2? -_-;
Having no solid cap but just slowing progress down to a crawl beyond a point encourages ultragrinding like you'd see with the people on Maple Story who everyone was pretty sure were three Chinese people logging on in shifts.

randomly generated items

So are we talking the little variations to items like you saw in Disgaea?

learn crafts via experimentation

And how do you keep players from just writing up a cookbook and distributing it within their guild or to the whole internet?

Magic via experimentation

Same thing.
...you know what ragnarok online did? You had to get several pieces of a particular equipment and then take them to a blacksmith to upgrade them with a chance of the item being destroyed. This made a +11 item really hot stuff but getting it was also extremely grindy. You just going to limit players doing this stuff by making it resource expensive or limiting how much they can get done in a day?

-Randomly generated HUGE world.

It's a bad idea to make it take a long time for a group of players to reach the same location in the world though. You should definitely give them a speedy form of travel so if they want to do something at a designated location they can get there quickly or possibly instantly.

Important resources

How much do you want to reward players that can exploit scarcity? I know most of the MMO wealth I get comes from exploiting how much I can get people to pay and that if I were devoted and got into the game early on that it would be a world issue.
Or just look at how the economy of star wars galaxies went with a lot of professions that relied on someone else being impossible to learn because all the easy to make generic stuff cost the fortune you make at high levels instead of being appropriately low level priced. The only reason for that was that people knew they could make more money than that and if someone tried to sell things at a reasonable price it was easy for a price gouger to buy them up and sell them for a proffit without even having done the work of making them.

-Herding, hunting, farming, fishing, etc...

So the tedious trouble of keeping food and water around AND players can price gouge because everyone needs food? Ouch.

-No ultimate item/material/whatever. Rock paper scissor materials

So will there be a way for players to investigate the opponents in an area other than going in with what is probably the wrong equipment or just carrying a packmule worth of armor all the time?

Now for the disclaimer: I do not believe such a game would ever be made, atleast not before we have quantum computers to run it and positronic brain AIs to help us make and manage it. And even if it WAS possible to make it, it would NEVER work as an MMO like WoW or others, because of the incredible emphasis on metagamming in these communities.

You just need to plan for those players. They're not going to the effort of turning the economy into their money making machine and finding the fastest way to level up because those things are enjoyable activities they would rather do than play the game how you intend.

Wikis would pop with theories on combat, item crafting, maps of the world, etc... within days of its opening. The only way it would work was with strictly enforced RP and with a small community (relative to other MMOs), like Fairy Tale Online is doing.

Actually for every question I've asked I've already thought up some answers (Ok, only most of them.) For the crafting you could keep the same procedure from having identical results between players except if somebody went through a long process of apprenticing another player in the craft. It would take some tweaking to keep it from being abused but seeing as playing together with a friend is usually more enjoyable than running around alone* you could actually make it less efficient time wise if the actual process wasn't very grind-y.

And a flat cap on learning per day seems like a bad idea both in terms of gaming and immersion. Instead it should be more like how you describe skillups in general where going beyond the cap started taking much more time. This would reward consistent work while also letting the obsessively dedicated to progress faster (and potentially taking care of how those people probably have more money as well.)

Nevertheless, I deeply hope somebody manages to make this game or a similar one in this century.

Actually I think once procedural generation starts making strides into fulfilling it's potential a lot of this stuff will become pretty common pretty quick.

Err, sorry for the huge post. I didn't know you were planning to reply to every single point of every single post, so I just went into rant-mode Also, I didn't intend that post to be a guide to what kind of game I'd like to play, it's the list of what would be the PERFECT game IMO. From what I'm reading, your MyWorld is still the kind of game I'd play.

Well, yeah. If we do make this, it'll be awesome (MyWorld). But, because it's 2D, it may scare off a large portion of the audience (Impressionable 12 year olds and incomprehensive fools).
So, a Wiki-game-destroyer-pedia may not become too much of a problem. Mind you,  you say a small community, yet DF is small (compared to many) and it has a Wiki filled with hacks and tips. Oh well.
Good post, man.

I don't mind 2D graphics at all. And scaring off the 'Impressionable 12 year olds and incomprehensive fools' is a huge bonus, it makes other people (including me) enjoy the game more!

So yeah, good luck on your game

No worries on the post size; it was the most useful one, and i was more laughing out of exasperation than beating off out of anger. (lol?).

but yeah; losing the nuggetheads is a good thing. They're the guys who make being a mod in a game = UURRGGHHHish.

If you apply a little noise to a simple diminishing returns formula you can keep people from figuring out how to manipulate the system right up till you hit the elitist metagamers who compile ridiculous amounts of data on their forum to work out how formulas behave- and you need quite a population before they'll go to the trouble.

As for maps, I think you should look into developing a map generator.  No matter how pretty your 2D maps are, they can still be broken down into component parts: towns, shops, roads, trees, mountains, walls, and tilesets.  Ultimately, it comes down to: checkpoints, obstacles, groups, events, and graphics.

You don't understand, i'm not using tiles. I'm using brushes in Paintshop, and that's it. Sure, I may make them into tiles, to make the process faster, but it generally looks alright.
For example, a wall. 3 tiles high, but nothing special as it goes horizontal.
Another example would be, a road. It won't be using squares, it'll go along without even thinking about tiles.

So afterward you draw a few invisible lines over top for where people can or can't walk?

But in this sense, every player is their own GM.

There there's no reason to build in anything but an avatar that can move around- people can just RP taking whatever kind of damage and getting hungry and so on in whatever style they prefer.

Oh, but that doesn't make for a very interesting game- there's no advantage playing GM in the game over playing GM in some chatroom- and we'd probably just end up playing tacticus:pantshelm anyway; anyone would when everyone is a GM. Anyone who wants to put something with a degree of quality to it together would have to do it in private and that defeats the point of an MMO.

Sure there are people that play alone instead of in a group but even they still want to be playing around other people, just not so much in a group with them.

Dark text with the Darkling theme in this forum is baaaad.

Anyway, someone said Everquest was permadeath.  Nope.  However, you did drop all your items where you died and had to go back for it.  If you jumped in lava, you were screwed.

Permadeath done right would be a good thing.  Personally, I think a step in that direction would be to have time based permadeath.  If you die 4 times in a 24 hour period, you lose... or something along those lines.  Perhaps a timed resurrection period or a fight to regain your soul from the underlings who took it from you.  I know UO did ghosts, but it would be similar to this and WoW's death march.  You could even build that into the skill trees or world makeup with passages between the  planes.  Players that traverse the inverse (or "death") worlds.  Players could see each other in these parallel universes.  Players in the under-world would appear like black cloudy wisps to the over-world and alternatively players in the overworld would look like white wisps.  Each world could have it's own quests and story.  If done properly, the buildings could even reflect a difference in appearance as opposed to just texture.

My perfect MMO however would have no long distant teleports.  Short distance absolutely could be used for navigating chasms in dungeons and such, but in order to maintain regionalized economies and trade you're going to have to plan your get togethers a little better and make sure people work their way to events beforehand.  Factions would need to play a big role like they did in EQ further enhancing the idea of regionalizing the world.  Traders would have to work their faction up to be able to trade freely and players would have to seek out black markets for items that belong to rival factions.

How about just no teleport style travel for materials instead? In fact this could be a whole explanation for why your gear would be "soulbound."

And for convenience stuff you didn't want to lose could be shoved off into a little pocket dimension you just had to return to to claim or maybe even just teleported back to town if that wasn't too imbalanced & exploitable. Or have both present with the pocket dimension for short teleports and sending it back to base if they take a long enough trip that it would have been faster to just haul it.

A note about being rewarded regularly: Of course gaining skill in something would reward you. However, it is the regularly thing that needs to be taken into consideration. Working towards skills should have mini-rewards upon the way other than working ones way towards 100% effectiveness, as well as such rewards generally coming relatively quickly.

 Basically, one would have mini-advances in a skill at the later levels of it that would provide small assistance to minor things like related skills and mini-skills. So say you have a skill with ten levels. The first advancement would come in ten minutes work. Each level up would double that requirement. At the end three hours of work will be needed to finish the skill, and a total of 5120 minutes or 85 hours.
 Wait, really 85 hours?
 *Checks math*
 Alright, I know that number can't be right.  Still, quite some time. My proposal is that during those spaces between awards(The 'level ups') there would be smaller rewards. Where the larger ones might award a 10% increase in efficiency, the smaller ones could add 1% in smaller skills over smaller requirements. Those three hours work would be filled with ten smaller 'level ups' which award small little bonuses, as to make such grinding less tedious.

 Basically, every hour of work should result in some reward for the player. Even if that reward is small, players should always feel they are accomplishing something.

If you wanted to control how much grinding they did but also get them working on it frequently you could have the reward come into effect the next day but overexertion would diminish it to the point it ended up even being a penalty that would be rather expensive to work through (though still allowing for more total progress while being a large money sink to keep the economy balanced with power gamers around.)

i concur 
(just couldnt resist)
I think I will go play Puzzle Pirates for a bit and do some blacksmithing jobs

[Rose]

bah, just have an MMO of DF adventure mode.

[Shadowgandor]

^win

[Poltifar]

As a reply to Shoku and ductape, I already said that my vision of the perfect game wasn't necessarily achievable, for two main reasons: One, it would be really hard to keep it fun while minimizing exploits and wikis turning up about all game secrets (as outlined in all the problems you pointed out), and Two, its MY vision of the perfect game, and I definitely don't expect that everyone (if even ANYone) is going to like the same kind of game I do So you can stop pointing out flaws in my ideas, we already agreed that they are flawed. (although I personally STILL want to see some of these things implemented someday, especially complex crafting)

My perfect MMO however would have no long distant teleports.  Short distance absolutely could be used for navigating chasms in dungeons and such, but in order to maintain regionalized economies and trade you're going to have to plan your get togethers a little better and make sure people work their way to events beforehand.  Factions would need to play a big role like they did in EQ further enhancing the idea of regionalizing the world.  Traders would have to work their faction up to be able to trade freely and players would have to seek out black markets for items that belong to rival factions.

Yes, for material diversification to actually make a difference, it should be hard to move very long distances around in the world. Going from Nation A to Nation B by foot through the wilderness and forests and mountains would take something like 12 RL hours (doesnt have to be consecutive, the player can 'camp' and log out) for the inexperienced (IE the ones that dont have nature and wilderness survival skills, as well as good combat skills or stealth skills for defending themselves from hostilities). Ofcourse, building a simple road would make the time 10 hours, a more complex and well protected road 8 hours, then getting mounts would make it 6,  better mounts would make 4... etc... then we can end up at a point where really important trading routes would have magical chariots or something as advanced to go really fast.

Teleportation SHOULD be allowed, including long-distance teleportation. But it would require such an experienced mage, and need such expensive materials, that it would only be used for EXTREME emergencies, or for moving extremely valuable and rare objects and materials when they are needed ASAP.

Also, the concept of roads and other forms of speeding-up transportations would lead to the possibility of revolts and ennemies and such cutting off vital trade routes, leading to too few food or materials, etc... interesting city-level interactions IMO.

The hard thing to do is to keep the whole thing FUN. Its no fun moving 12 hours along a road without anything ta do. So, have the world full of stuff. Possibilities of new resources to be found anywhere, random ennemies and events being common, and most importantly, having the resource trading me VERY profitable to justify the 12 hour trek. Although if its a player-run economy, it most definitely will be.

Again, I KNOW there are tons of flaws in this design. I know that my '12 hour trek' idea is especially flawed and unfeasible. It's just my idea of a great game I'd like to play, no need to keep telling me how flawed it is.

bah, just have an MMO of DF adventure mode.

I agree. Start with a very simple tile-based thing, no more complex than the actual DF adventure mode is, then add stuff like construction etc. to it. Shouldn't be TOO hard to make if its kept simple, and would be a fun thing to play in spare time. Heck, it could be done in a present free game engine if its not supposed to be an actual MMOG, just an MOG (as in, only 20-50 players online at any time), and if its supposed to be a free, and part-time project. BYOND pops to mind.

[Asehujiko]

-Post apocalyptic steampunk setting. Nukes fell, EMP pulse wiped out all technology beyond 1900, humanity is back at the first world war in terms of manufacturing but with more modern ideas.
-The map Darkfail was originally hyped to have.
-Red faction style terrain modification.
-A Garry's mod approach to building vehicles. Want a car? Find enough wheels and an engine and learn how to correctly put them together. Want to steer the thing? Back to the drawing board. No default building plans saying "car: requires 4 wheels, engine 2 fuzzy dice and lvl 34 engineering". If you have the time and patience, you should be able to build things like the Leviathan from Rise of Legends by taping enough components together.

Not much of a role playing game but building ridiculous forts and then assaulting them with even weirder mad max style vehicles has it's charm too.

[Neonivek]

Goodness Asehujiko... are you sure you wouldn't rather have "Gary's Mod the MMO"?

Though what your speaking about sounds a bit like other games I played/seen: Alpha World, Legoland (or whatever it is called)

[Poltifar]

Goodness Asehujiko... are you sure you wouldn't rather have "Gary's Mod the MMO"?

I'd like to have that... If Garry's mod stopped CRASHING EVERY FIVE MINUTES on my PC. Until then, something more stable is appreciated.

[Thndr]

-Post apocalyptic steampunk setting. Nukes fell, EMP pulse wiped out all technology beyond 1900, humanity is back at the first world war in terms of manufacturing but with more modern ideas.

Lest we forget the russians and their mighty MiG 25? A supersonic jet using vacuum tubes.
And we all know vacuum tubes are highly resistant to EMPs.

Apart from Russia's involvement in any MAD (Mutually Assure Distruction) scenarios, it would become the world's largest superpower after such a terrific event.