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.)