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[Azkanan]

bah, just have an MMO of DF adventure mode.

I did do that once... But then realized that Toady would bash me for finishing it .

I was cool. Running around, mining, ambushing elf traders in a valley - all of it was in ASCII.

[Sowelu]

-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.

That sounds like a LOT of fun.  I enjoy those silly games where you stick a bunch of rods and wheels together to make something that drives to a place to deliver a thing to another thing.  It would be WAY fun if you could use those things against other players, and have to defend against your enemy's awesome vehicles by making your own custom ones that take advantage of weaknesses.

On the other hand, maybe I actually want BattleBots the MMO.  There HAVE been a few non-MMO multiplayer things like that...

[Chutney]

There's hope!

FFXI (Final Fantasy 11)!
It has:
-Obscene travel times! Going from one nation to another can take days!
-What resources your nation has access to in stores depends on which areas it controls!
-Only high level mages can do long distance teleports! High 40's, to be exact!
-Almost all weapons and armor are crafted by players! This means a player run economy, too!

This might be updated, considering the last time I played was like 4 years ago.
The major flaw of the game was levelling was hell. Spend 3 hours getting a party, fight lizards for an hour, the White Mage has to leave, spend 2 more hours finding a new white mage, a ghoul attacks and kills your party. Spend your hour of being dead trying to find a resurrect and have to disband because everyone had to go back to their home point (which was about 3 hours of travel away from the leveling area)

[Sowelu]

All I know about FFXI is that their end-bosses wish that you, the player, were dead.  Something along the lines of killing tier-1 monsters that have a 10% chance of dropping a pass to fight a tier-2 monster, which has a 10% chance of dropping a pass to fight one tier-3 monster, etc, up to tier 5s, which cheat so horribly badly that they have spells that literally kill all players within a kilometer of them, and cast them with alarming frequency.  There are many top-end monsters that nobody has any idea how to fight, and that take literal years to collect the stuff required to make ONE attempt at them.

I may have my story slightly wrong...but not by much.

I'm not sure that this is all a bad thing.

[commondragon]

*AHEM*

-Incredibly large maps.  Yes, that was plural.  I want to see a it take days to cross from one place to another on one PLANET so you can go to the the only magic gate on that side of the world to get to ANOTHER planet.
-Magic AND Science, FUSED.  If you can fling balls of lighting it should only make the development of say, laser pistols, accelerated.
-Skills increasingly harder to get as you level them, and that goes across the board.  If you want a high level mage, then good luck trying to get any decent leveling in lumberjack after spending all that time getting Cross planar portalling level 9 (This encourages specialization and keeps people from being the same).
-Make things harder to learn the more realistically. A wizard or engineer shouldnt level as fast as a fighter or theif, I mean, it takes study to learn to cast spells or build turrets, a guy can start swinging a damn sword or hiding in barrels pretty early.)
-GM regulated town creation.  WHY? Because, that way, we can more easily use it for "oh hey, my "Memory map" spell tells me that [Generic Player Made Town #513] is to the east."
-Country system, because everyone wants to try to own a kingdom of about 100,000 players and keep it running.
-Extensive crafting system.
-Magma, flowing magma.
-Booze, flowing booze.
-Permadeath
-Player artifact creation.  Leaving forever? sacrifice your level bajillion character for a nice level 102 artifact, which will quickly be scooped up by some level 700-or-so theif after they evade your traps in your large dungeon.
-Digging, after all, if you try to dig a reservoir near a dungeon, you should risk some newbie digging through the wall and unleashing hell upon your city.
-Extensive crafting, player economies are best.
-Large race list, WITH racial limitations.  I dont want to see your droids casting instant-meteor-in-a-can at all the fucking elves, as much as they deserve it.
-Mounts.  When we start arguements about the riding speed on centaur back I will be happy.
-Possibility for large scale combat.  Someone has to destroy the damn cities, and it isnt going to be Sir Exceptional Greifer.
-Want to keep your stuff? Get a house and hire a locksmith past level 30.
-Permadeath? Sure, with certain in-game getarounds.
-Hirable NPCs, just make sure you send them to 99999MMOman99999's NPC academy so they can actually do something.  Expect them back in a billion years.  or train an NPC to train your NPCs.
-Freeform terrain modification if you feel like ultragrinding.  Although if you get to the point where you can implode a planet via magic/deathstar, then you pretty much have to have been ultragrinding a destruction mage/weapons engineer for about 10 RL years.  With no snack breaks or visits to your grandmother, and someone hired to play you while you sleep.
-Wait, we arent catering to the dumbasses? Bad buisness practices man!
-Elves get racial cannibal skill.
-Dwarves get other creatures drunk when they are hit with a blood suck attack.
-Body-part based damage system.
-Stance changing system (AKA:LOLOLOL I DONT CARE HOW STUPID IT IS IM GONNA MAKE MY HUMAN WALK ON HIS HANDS)
-Penalties for going under minimum stats: (INT WARNING, IF YOU GO 6 OR UNDER YOU CANNOT SPEAK OUTSIDE YOUR OWN RACE/IF YOU GO 3 OR UNDER YOU CANNOT SPEAK TO OTHER PLAYERS).  Great for roleplaying or in the given case, greifers with IRC.
-Complaining about how the game actually makes you wait while your enchanting that ultrasword for the 11th time? There should be an option to play tacticus or the like.
-Ha, I've trained my training skill to 9000, now I can make a business training people...wait what? I actually have to have levels in other things to train people!? Gah! My grand money scheme is gone! I must suicide and restart!
-"So I heard the griefers killed another cloud of AFK people." "What? If you press AFK you stop existing. What the hell were they, a bunch of noobs?"
-Decent transition from tech heavy to magic heavy areas.
-Oh hey, I didnt know space in the plane of fire was just a floating ocean of magma.  Time to re-gen as a fire elemental.

[Azkanan]

*AHEM*

-Incredibly large maps.  Yes, that was plural.  I want to see a it take days to cross from one place to another on one PLANET so you can go to the the only magic gate on that side of the world to get to ANOTHER planet.
-Magic AND Science, FUSED.  If you can fling balls of lighting it should only make the development of say, laser pistols, accelerated.
-Skills increasingly harder to get as you level them, and that goes across the board.  If you want a high level mage, then good luck trying to get any decent leveling in lumberjack after spending all that time getting Cross planar portalling level 9 (This encourages specialization and keeps people from being the same).
-Make things harder to learn the more realistically. A wizard or engineer shouldnt level as fast as a fighter or theif, I mean, it takes study to learn to cast spells or build turrets, a guy can start swinging a damn sword or hiding in barrels pretty early.)
-GM regulated town creation.  WHY? Because, that way, we can more easily use it for "oh hey, my "Memory map" spell tells me that [Generic Player Made Town #513] is to the east."
-Country system, because everyone wants to try to own a kingdom of about 100,000 players and keep it running.
-Extensive crafting system.
-Magma, flowing magma.
-Booze, flowing booze.
-Permadeath
-Player artifact creation.  Leaving forever? sacrifice your level bajillion character for a nice level 102 artifact, which will quickly be scooped up by some level 700-or-so theif after they evade your traps in your large dungeon.
-Digging, after all, if you try to dig a reservoir near a dungeon, you should risk some newbie digging through the wall and unleashing hell upon your city.
-Extensive crafting, player economies are best.
-Large race list, WITH racial limitations.  I dont want to see your droids casting instant-meteor-in-a-can at all the fucking elves, as much as they deserve it.
-Mounts.  When we start arguements about the riding speed on centaur back I will be happy.
-Possibility for large scale combat.  Someone has to destroy the damn cities, and it isnt going to be Sir Exceptional Greifer.
-Want to keep your stuff? Get a house and hire a locksmith past level 30.
-Permadeath? Sure, with certain in-game getarounds.
-Hirable NPCs, just make sure you send them to 99999MMOman99999's NPC academy so they can actually do something.  Expect them back in a billion years.  or train an NPC to train your NPCs.
-Freeform terrain modification if you feel like ultragrinding.  Although if you get to the point where you can implode a planet via magic/deathstar, then you pretty much have to have been ultragrinding a destruction mage/weapons engineer for about 10 RL years.  With no snack breaks or visits to your grandmother, and someone hired to play you while you sleep.
-Wait, we arent catering to the dumbasses? Bad buisness practices man!
-Elves get racial cannibal skill.
-Dwarves get other creatures drunk when they are hit with a blood suck attack.
-Body-part based damage system.
-Stance changing system (AKA:LOLOLOL I DONT CARE HOW STUPID IT IS IM GONNA MAKE MY HUMAN WALK ON HIS HANDS)
-Penalties for going under minimum stats: (INT WARNING, IF YOU GO 6 OR UNDER YOU CANNOT SPEAK OUTSIDE YOUR OWN RACE/IF YOU GO 3 OR UNDER YOU CANNOT SPEAK TO OTHER PLAYERS).  Great for roleplaying or in the given case, greifers with IRC.
-Complaining about how the game actually makes you wait while your enchanting that ultrasword for the 11th time? There should be an option to play tacticus or the like.
-Ha, I've trained my training skill to 9000, now I can make a business training people...wait what? I actually have to have levels in other things to train people!? Gah! My grand money scheme is gone! I must suicide and restart!
-"So I heard the griefers killed another cloud of AFK people." "What? If you press AFK you stop existing. What the hell were they, a bunch of noobs?"
-Decent transition from tech heavy to magic heavy areas.
-Oh hey, I didnt know space in the plane of fire was just a floating ocean of magma.  Time to re-gen as a fire elemental.

-Incredibly Large Maps
Yes.

Magic and Science?
Not quite, no. High Fantasy.

Skills increasingly harder to get as you level them
Yes.

GM Regulated town creation.
Whut? Do you mean, add them to a map system? Yes.

Country system
You can only have so-many villages per Province - which is set by the king.

Extensive crafting system.
Yes.

Magma.
Yes.

Booze.
Yes.

(Sex)
Yes.

Permadeath.
Maybe - still on the fence with this one.

Player Artifact Creation
Yes.

Diggiong.
Yes.

Player Economies
Yes.

Large Race List
We only have 6 playable races thus far.

Mounts
Yes.

Possibility for large scale combat.
Yes.

-Want to keep your stuff? Get a house and hire a locksmith past level 30.
Yes.

-Hirable NPCs | or train an NPC to train your NPCs.
Yes. Yes.

-Freeform terrain modification.
Maybe. Too easily trolled.

-Wait, we arent catering to the dumbasses? Bad buisness practices man!
Other way around; catering to intellects.

-Elves get racial cannibal skill.
Hmm...

-Dwarves get other creatures drunk when they are hit with a blood suck attack.
No.

-Body-part based damage system.
No.

-Stance changing system
I don't see how that would help, unless you mean different Katas, for example. In that case, Yes.

-Penalties for going under minimum stats
Sounds like a good idea.

-Complaining about how the game actually makes you wait while your enchanting that ultrasword for the 11th time? There should be an option to play tacticus or the like.
Alt Tab.

-Ha, I've trained my training skill to 9000, now I can make a business training people...wait what? I actually have to have levels in other things to train people!? Gah! My grand money scheme is gone! I must suicide and restart!
I don't get it.

-"So I heard the griefers killed another cloud of AFK people." "What? If you press AFK you stop existing. What the hell were they, a bunch of noobs?"
Don't go AFK, close the game till you get back. Or sit in a locked home.

-Decent transition from tech heavy to magic heavy areas.
Tech? Nu. Or at least, not yet.

-Oh hey, I didnt know space in the plane of fire was just a floating ocean of magma.  Time to re-gen as a fire elemental.
Uh...No?


That's my response on how MyWorld is planned to work.

[Shoku]

"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...

I'm working increadibly hard but he's also working incredibly hard so I never catch up.

The people who start early and are at the top after a year obviously play hard enough that they will stay that way as long as they keep playing.

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.

If it's actually infinite it ends up all being a bunch of random junk you stop caring about after you've seen a good portion of it.

Most of the big ones have content that reaches to the point that maybe 2% of the people in the game will ever reach the end. If you design the game to keep them busy always achieving pretty soon 98% of the players who are genuinely trying pretty hard are never going to see hardly any of it.
It becomes totally unattainable and pretty soon the metagamers start to abuse the heavily.

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.

"No, you can't have iron because you'll just turn it into garbage and those of us with money want some high quality gear. You can learn how to make armor good when this becomes the land of milk and honey but for now you sure as hell can't afford it."

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.

Just having food and water to rest after battles with is annoying to most people.

The key is to make PC farming be fun and exciting.

It will be easy to make it about as exciting as most professions are but that's not saying much.

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.

You can take out the word might there.

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)

So then it's like we are talking about sandwiches and you're just listing all of your favorite toppings but because you've said they make the perfect sandwich I'm all in a huff about how tartar sauce shouldn't be mixed with ketchup?

All I know about FFXI is that their end-bosses wish that you, the player, were dead.  Something along the lines of killing tier-1 monsters that have a 10% chance of dropping a pass to fight a tier-2 monster, which has a 10% chance of dropping a pass to fight one tier-3 monster, etc, up to tier 5s, which cheat so horribly badly that they have spells that literally kill all players within a kilometer of them, and cast them with alarming frequency.  There are many top-end monsters that nobody has any idea how to fight, and that take literal years to collect the stuff required to make ONE attempt at them.

I may have my story slightly wrong...but not by much.

I'm not sure that this is all a bad thing.

I read about one that a guild spent 16 hours fighting before they decided it the development team didn't really understand what kind of performance you should ask for from humans.

*AHEM*

-Incredibly large maps.  Yes, that was plural.  I want to see a it take days to cross from one place to another on one PLANET so you can go to the the only magic gate on that side of the world to get to ANOTHER planet.

Which is awesome if you don't plan to play with any of your friends or make any friends in the game that you'll ever meet again.

-Magic AND Science, FUSED.  If you can fling balls of lighting it should only make the development of say, laser pistols, accelerated.
-Skills increasingly harder to get as you level them, and that goes across the board.  If you want a high level mage, then good luck trying to get any decent leveling in lumberjack after spending all that time getting Cross planar portalling level 9 (This encourages specialization and keeps people from being the same).

Usually that has the opposite effect. Portal guy is just like every other portal guy.

The two professions thing on paper should mean that you have a large multiple of combinations for people but in practice the requirements of one usually railroad you into having something that gets you those materials.

Anybody know of any games where every combination is complementary?

-Make things harder to learn the more realistically. A wizard or engineer shouldnt level as fast as a fighter or theif, I mean, it takes study to learn to cast spells or build turrets, a guy can start swinging a damn sword or hiding in barrels pretty early.)

There's an off-on-your-own-as-a-child form of engineering as well: taping together cardboard boxes to make the cat "play" in. And if the kids there are even close to the kinds of pyromaniacs I grew up with you wouldn't need a "fireball" so much as a "firemarble."

It's just that machinery and high magic are likely to maim you horribly if you don't learn how to avoid the ways other people have been horribly maimed... but player characters are usually supposed to be a little bit special anyway- the loss of life and limb need only happen to NPCs as children and the players were lucky to get through that part of life safely the same way you would be lucky to not get shipped off to the ogre den if you hid in barrels all the time or poke out your eye when you foolishly swung your sword at or near some hard material you shouldn't have (and didn't have the muscles to deal with the rebound.)

-GM regulated town creation.  WHY? Because, that way, we can more easily use it for "oh hey, my "Memory map" spell tells me that [Generic Player Made Town #513] is to the east."

GM regulation is a rather large investment in a world the size you want. It's not really feasible.

-Country system, because everyone wants to try to own a kingdom of about 100,000 players and keep it running.

Won't the only people that get to king status be the cheaty metagamer types? Everyone else is pretty much on equal footing and sheer luck isn't going to put just one player in an area that much higher than the rest.

-Extensive crafting system.
-Magma, flowing magma.

You don't really see flow in a way that matters in MMOs very much. It's pretty much stagnant, fake motion, or fake motion with a coveyor belt type script.

-Booze, flowing booze.
-Permadeath
-Player artifact creation.  Leaving forever? sacrifice your level bajillion character for a nice level 102 artifact, which will quickly be scooped up by some level 700-or-so theif after they evade your traps in your large dungeon.

I'm leaving. Why would I bother?

-Digging, after all, if you try to dig a reservoir near a dungeon, you should risk some newbie digging through the wall and unleashing hell upon your city.

More likely somebody you pissed off in chat.

-Extensive crafting, player economies are best.

Where? In your head?

-Large race list, WITH racial limitations.  I dont want to see your droids casting instant-meteor-in-a-can at all the fucking elves, as much as they deserve it.
-Mounts.  When we start arguements about the riding speed on centaur back I will be happy.
-Possibility for large scale combat.  Someone has to destroy the damn cities, and it isnt going to be Sir Exceptional Greifer.

That's exactly who it is going to be if there is much penalty for losing or much incentive for winning but any kind of grinding to it.

-Want to keep your stuff? Get a house and hire a locksmith past level 30.

You mentioned tech earlier so perhaps they should have an electrician install hidden cameras instead and then sue thieves to get their items back and a little extra compensation for emotional damage.

-Permadeath? Sure, with certain in-game getarounds.
-Hirable NPCs, just make sure you send them to 99999MMOman99999's NPC academy so they can actually do something.  Expect them back in a billion years.  or train an NPC to train your NPCs.

Wouldn't ones who already had some training just cost more?

-Freeform terrain modification if you feel like ultragrinding.  Although if you get to the point where you can implode a planet via magic/deathstar, then you pretty much have to have been ultragrinding a destruction mage/weapons engineer for about 10 RL years.  With no snack breaks or visits to your grandmother, and someone hired to play you while you sleep.

If ten people grinded that hard for just 1 year wouldn't you pretty much see every planet they could get to exploded?

-Wait, we arent catering to the dumbasses? Bad buisness practices man!
-Elves get racial cannibal skill.
-Dwarves get other creatures drunk when they are hit with a blood suck attack.
-Body-part based damage system.
-Stance changing system (AKA:LOLOLOL I DONT CARE HOW STUPID IT IS IM GONNA MAKE MY HUMAN WALK ON HIS HANDS)
-Penalties for going under minimum stats: (INT WARNING, IF YOU GO 6 OR UNDER YOU CANNOT SPEAK OUTSIDE YOUR OWN RACE/IF YOU GO 3 OR UNDER YOU CANNOT SPEAK TO OTHER PLAYERS).  Great for roleplaying or in the given case, greifers with IRC.
-Complaining about how the game actually makes you wait while your enchanting that ultrasword for the 11th time? There should be an option to play tacticus or the like.
-Ha, I've trained my training skill to 9000, now I can make a business training people...wait what? I actually have to have levels in other things to train people!? Gah! My grand money scheme is gone! I must suicide and restart!
-"So I heard the griefers killed another cloud of AFK people." "What? If you press AFK you stop existing. What the hell were they, a bunch of noobs?"

If you want large worlds without fast travel there is a great delay for organizing any group activity (just getting people takes long enough with teleports to get them together,) and if you're complaining about people using IRC to communicate outside the game there's a little discrepancy problem here.

-Decent transition from tech heavy to magic heavy areas.

With what you described early should areas with high magic also be high tech?

-Oh hey, I didnt know space in the plane of fire was just a floating ocean of magma.  Time to re-gen as a fire elemental.

:/

-

So what's up with everyone wanting non-skill based activities to be troublesome and have all of these forms of scarcity mixed in with learners using the same materials as experts? What game did you enjoy those things in?

[Rhodan]

People tend to overestimate their own attention span, and underestimate their pattern recognition skills.
Anything will eventually become a grind.  No matter how complex they make it, eventually you'll end up having seen it all and are just grinding to make the pretty numbers go higher.  Take Dwarf Fortress world maps for example.  There is an infinite amount of possible maps, with infinite possible histories, but after only a few maps you know how it works, only the occasional elf-less world will be interesting.
So even the most complexiest crafting system would eventually become a grind, it just takes a bit longer.

Player interaction, involving stories, hand-crafted content, new game mechanics, and stuff all added on a regular basis are what would really catch and keep attention.  I don't think any game can ever be complex enough to be left alone and remain interesting.

I suggest hiring staff to work as entertainers in the game itself.  Playing important figures in the game in order to run special events, do politics, send out evil minions, raise taxes, set bounties, require rescuing...  Imagine a global quest to rescue the princess, and the princess is actually another person you can hold a conversation with, who'll stay in her role and act just like a princess would in books and stories.
Would be trickier with 1000+ players to interact with, but having an actual King ruling the kingdom seems a lot more fun than an NPC or a player that tends to disappear or abuse his power in a metagamey way.

[Poltifar]

[All that stuff]

So what's up with everyone wanting non-skill based activities to be troublesome and have all of these forms of scarcity mixed in with learners using the same materials as experts? What game did you enjoy those things in?

I never enjoyed a game like the one I described because it was never made. But I HAVE enjoyed some parts of it in many different games, which leads me to believe that a combination of them would make a game I personally would enjoy.

Also, all the inconveniences you mention would only apply to the really massive online games like WoW and such. Like I said, I'd far prefer playing a game with a small community of 30-50 players on at any time, with a GM or two on also, and preferably RP enforced. If it was properly done and moderated, most of your points would then automatically become moot and/or irrelevant, since they could be easily dealt with. (Although the world wouldn't have to be THAT huge, just large relative to the amount of people that play)

Player interaction, involving stories, hand-crafted content, new game mechanics, and stuff all added on a regular basis are what would really catch and keep attention.  I don't think any game can ever be complex enough to be left alone and remain interesting.

Stories are fine and all, but only if they are WELL MADE. Which isnt the case in WoW, or ABSOLUTELY ANY OTHER MMORPG I HAVE EVER PLAYED, SEEN, OR HEARD OF. I challenge you to show me ONE MMORP with truly well-made stories. And by that, I mean:
-NO quests of kill x that, gather y that, send this to that, etc.
-ALL quests actually MAKE A DIFFERENCE when they are completed. So, if the king asks you to rescue the princess and you complete the quest, it STAYS completed. Another player that comes can't just take the very same quest again. Also, a quest like a king asking you to 'assassinate the lord of that castle' would not just mean the lord stays dead, but also that the king that asked you to kill him would then send his forces to the castle and take it over or something...

Now, again, I challenge you or anybody else to show me a single MMORPG that has this kind of realistic storyline.

So, I'm not saying a good storyline and quest isn't excellent to have in a game. I'm saying that such a thing is completely and utterly impossible to do in an MMORPG. But, the idea of a small community with GMs comes to mind again, with enforced RP and maybe GM-made events from time to time. Just see how we play SS13. There is no game-play reason that the crew couldn't just gang up the captain, beat him up, steal his weapons and start massive gang wars every single round we play. Its the RP that keeps them together, with the little yet awesome game mechanics adding to it. Now, if we UPGRADED the game mechanics AND kept the RP, that would be an amazing game.

[commondragon]

Meh, I was in rant mode when I posted that stuff anyways.  Let me say a couple things:

The elf cannibals, flowing booze, and dwarven beer-blood were jokes.

What I meant about the training thing is that you should also have to have skills in whatever skill your trying to train AS WELL as a training skill for common sense reasons.  I mean, how can you teach someone to cook a meal fit for a king if you cant even boil water?

Player artifact creation would be a limited thing, to prevent every level-something-or-other dwarf metalsmith from standing in the middle of [Dwarven artifact safehaven#1,000,000] waiting for the random fey mood, or whatever other racial/skill class artifact methods there will be.

Large maps would be good for the transportation buisness.  Sure at first it will be kinda harsh on the playerbase but a few temporary NPC services can be made with high prices to encourage player buisnesses, and then take them out once the player telepot-buisness has a solid foundation.  Also allows the creation of lots of towns an such, and the possibility of uneven resource distribution that makes regional trade WORTH something.

And making varations of all the maps for the various planes of existence? Why the fuck not.  Encourages high-level players with specialized enchanted gear to take up questing to this amazing place they found, hiring a PC water elemental to scout ahead for them because they had to take off their good armor sounds like more interaction to me.

Also, 6 races a far from enough for me, but then again, Im a guy who wants as much shit as possible to cram into a game without killing it.

Player interaction, involving stories, hand-crafted content, new game mechanics, and stuff all added on a regular basis are what would really catch and keep attention.  I don't think any game can ever be complex enough to be left alone and remain interesting.

Stories are fine and all, but only if they are WELL MADE. Which isnt the case in WoW, or ABSOLUTELY ANY OTHER MMORPG I HAVE EVER PLAYED, SEEN, OR HEARD OF. I challenge you to show me ONE MMORP with truly well-made stories. And by that, I mean:
-NO quests of kill x that, gather y that, send this to that, etc.
-ALL quests actually MAKE A DIFFERENCE when they are completed. So, if the king asks you to rescue the princess and you complete the quest, it STAYS completed. Another player that comes can't just take the very same quest again. Also, a quest like a king asking you to 'assassinate the lord of that castle' would not just mean the lord stays dead, but also that the king that asked you to kill him would then send his forces to the castle and take it over or something...

Now, again, I challenge you or anybody else to show me a single MMORPG that has this kind of realistic storyline.

So, I'm not saying a good storyline and quest isn't excellent to have in a game. I'm saying that such a thing is completely and utterly impossible to do in an MMORPG. But, the idea of a small community with GMs comes to mind again, with enforced RP and maybe GM-made events from time to time. Just see how we play SS13. There is no game-play reason that the crew couldn't just gang up the captain, beat him up, steal his weapons and start massive gang wars every single round we play. Its the RP that keeps them together, with the little yet awesome game mechanics adding to it. Now, if we UPGRADED the game mechanics AND kept the RP, that would be an amazing game.

The problem is that if you want any money you would have to cater at least somewhat to the dumbass population, which is about 97.5% of the world.  This means that if they cant take the NPC quest that other guy just took he's gonna complain, and when they all realise that, they either bumrush any quest being given out (20%)or just plain quit and play WoW(80%).  You can have such things however, if you encourage the players to hand out offers to other players. You dont need an special quest system (ok, yes you do, the dumbasses wouldn't understand its a player-given quest without one), just "Ok, so I killed that guy living in your basement, here's his glass omega-sword Im taking, you can keep your 1000 gold."

[bjlong]

"No, you can't have iron because you'll just turn it into garbage and those of us with money want some high quality gear. You can learn how to make armor good when this becomes the land of milk and honey but for now you sure as hell can't afford it."

I suppose this would require some balancing--iron shouldn't be prohibitively expensive, but iron miners need to make a living. Adjusting carrying capacity and how fine-grained the units are might help a player-based economy. (Most armor needs surprisingly small amounts of metal. Not just-a-few-grains small, but around 4-8 pounds for a complete set is realistic. So you could train on gauntlets with a half-pound chunk easily.)

Pack mules should pay for themselves quickly for miners. Might help.

Just having food and water to rest after battles with is annoying to most people. It will be easy to make it about as exciting as most professions are but that's not saying much.

True, but I take Harvest Moon as a proof-of-concept. Cutting down the food requirement to 1 meal per day that you log in might make things more forgiving. It would also make travel more interesting if you could forage for food. 

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 will encourage the formation of "companies" or what-have-you to exploit this resource. Probably not a bad thing, either.

Fixed for you.

The idea of greifers in a free-form world like this would require guards. If we require that they be PC guards, that'd be an easy way to make money. It would also be boring. Possibly hiring NPC guards would help. I'd like to make the point that greifing should be hard to do in these worlds. That'd help some.

[Sergius]

I had this idea for a MMO:

You're not a character, you're you. As in, you're some disembodied spirit or soul or whatever, and YOU gain experience the more you play, and you can generate a character with that experience, and if he dies, he dies, maybe even have children that become NPCs that you can possess, and then use your own experience points to raise his skills or whatever. Maybe with a cap (so most players are around the same power level, but sorta unique), but you gain experience in different areas (like in Fable where you spend points in "magic" or "stealth" skills) so your next character can be either more specialized or not. So basically you unlock stuff as you play, like the ability of making more varied characters, or unlock "skill cards" that you can apply to your new characters. And if you're too damn lazy to make a new character every time you die, there are ways around permadeath, but somehow the game encourages you to die and "move on", like creating a powerful bloodline. Then maybe you can inherit some of the items you previously had, IF they're powerful artifacts (not generic equipment). I didn't exactly polish the idea much.

Oh yeah and the world was fractally generated with infinite zoom levels, and there were geography-changing spell effects that could leave a huge crater anywhere (which would be saved on top of the fractal geography), same thing with cities and stuff. And you could influence the evolution of a site (such as a town) but without having to build it brick by brick (but you could build a house in the "procedurally generated" town). It had layers of fractal + custom content.  Like an onion, or an ogre.

Rant rant rant rant...

EDIT: Oh yeah, and your experience points don't dwindle when you use them, but the new "character" has to sort of "powerlevel", which is really fast tho (except the game is point based, not level based), until he reached the actual experience points you used to create him, and then you start gaining more XP for your "soul" again.

And you don't even have to die, you can "abandon" your current character, who will keep living as a NPC and maybe become a major character in the world or something.

[Shoku]

People tend to overestimate their own attention span, and underestimate their pattern recognition skills.
Anything will eventually become a grind.  No matter how complex they make it, eventually you'll end up having seen it all and are just grinding to make the pretty numbers go higher.  Take Dwarf Fortress world maps for example.  There is an infinite amount of possible maps, with infinite possible histories, but after only a few maps you know how it works, only the occasional elf-less world will be interesting.
So even the most complexiest crafting system would eventually become a grind, it just takes a bit longer.

Player interaction, involving stories, hand-crafted content, new game mechanics, and stuff all added on a regular basis are what would really catch and keep attention.  I don't think any game can ever be complex enough to be left alone and remain interesting.

I suggest hiring staff to work as entertainers in the game itself.  Playing important figures in the game in order to run special events, do politics, send out evil minions, raise taxes, set bounties, require rescuing...  Imagine a global quest to rescue the princess, and the princess is actually another person you can hold a conversation with, who'll stay in her role and act just like a princess would in books and stories.
Would be trickier with 1000+ players to interact with, but having an actual King ruling the kingdom seems a lot more fun than an NPC or a player that tends to disappear or abuse his power in a metagamey way.

Paying for servers is hard enough for most of these games without adding on fees for full time acting staff. If you have enough of them to really see them in the world that's an awful lot of employees.

You could probably outsource it a bit after awhile though by offering the position to prestigious characters during events and just having a functional reporting system for if they go rogue.

[All that stuff]

So what's up with everyone wanting non-skill based activities to be troublesome and have all of these forms of scarcity mixed in with learners using the same materials as experts? What game did you enjoy those things in?

I never enjoyed a game like the one I described because it was never made. But I HAVE enjoyed some parts of it in many different games, which leads me to believe that a combination of them would make a game I personally would enjoy.

Also, all the inconveniences you mention would only apply to the really massive online games like WoW and such. Like I said, I'd far prefer playing a game with a small community of 30-50 players on at any time, with a GM or two on also, and preferably RP enforced. If it was properly done and moderated, most of your points would then automatically become moot and/or irrelevant, since they could be easily dealt with. (Although the world wouldn't have to be THAT huge, just large relative to the amount of people that play)

So you want to run around on your own but with other people in proximity and don't really want to do any of the grouped up type things?

Player interaction, involving stories, hand-crafted content, new game mechanics, and stuff all added on a regular basis are what would really catch and keep attention.  I don't think any game can ever be complex enough to be left alone and remain interesting.

Stories are fine and all, but only if they are WELL MADE. Which isnt the case in WoW, or ABSOLUTELY ANY OTHER MMORPG I HAVE EVER PLAYED, SEEN, OR HEARD OF. I challenge you to show me ONE MMORP with truly well-made stories. And by that, I mean:
-NO quests of kill x that, gather y that, send this to that, etc.
-ALL quests actually MAKE A DIFFERENCE when they are completed. So, if the king asks you to rescue the princess and you complete the quest, it STAYS completed. Another player that comes can't just take the very same quest again. Also, a quest like a king asking you to 'assassinate the lord of that castle' would not just mean the lord stays dead, but also that the king that asked you to kill him would then send his forces to the castle and take it over or something...

You can't really do things like slay the lord of another castle with only 50 people on at a time (assuming half aren't at the right degree of progression for any particular thing at a time.)

Now, again, I challenge you or anybody else to show me a single MMORPG that has this kind of realistic storyline.

I had an idea for how you could have time progression without taking the early world state away from new players. It might even work really well with only one person actually completes high profile tasks like princess rescue...

So, I'm not saying a good storyline and quest isn't excellent to have in a game. I'm saying that such a thing is completely and utterly impossible to do in an MMORPG.

For now that's because procedural generation is pretty much limited to shuffling a deck of cards or however many fancy ways you can apply perlin noise. Some time in the next decade you'll see a program that could set up the "kill the rats in my cellar" quests but also do that sparingly enough that the overall results are what you would call good quests.

Left 4 Dead used it for enemy placement (aside from the very special two which got hand picked locations,) and some item placement and the sequel to it's got the altered path through a mausoleum sort of thing going on so if they keep at it in that series we might soon see things like PG actually doing the buildings themselves from the floorplan down to where an overturned gurney goes and where some short term fortifications are at.
That's about the same level of sophistication as what you need random quests that aren't so blaringly random or repetitive- it's close to where you can't tell if a human made it or not.

But, the idea of a small community with GMs comes to mind again, with enforced RP and maybe GM-made events from time to time. Just see how we play SS13. There is no game-play reason that the crew couldn't just gang up the captain, beat him up, steal his weapons and start massive gang wars every single round we play. Its the RP that keeps them together, with the little yet awesome game mechanics adding to it. Now, if we UPGRADED the game mechanics AND kept the RP, that would be an amazing game.

"No, you can't have iron because you'll just turn it into garbage and those of us with money want some high quality gear. You can learn how to make armor good when this becomes the land of milk and honey but for now you sure as hell can't afford it."

I suppose this would require some balancing--iron shouldn't be prohibitively expensive, but iron miners need to make a living. Adjusting carrying capacity and how fine-grained the units are might help a player-based economy. (Most armor needs surprisingly small amounts of metal. Not just-a-few-grains small, but around 4-8 pounds for a complete set is realistic. So you could train on gauntlets with a half-pound chunk easily.)

If a half pound chunk is available to a low level player with a low level pocketbook then it's not scarce.

You could sort of juggle this issue by allowing the item unmade and then remade if the artisan managed to produce something of higher quality else the material be reduced to near worthless scrap. Seems like you could make it so people would want to funnel available resources into novice learning and so on up to the top if you did it right but seeing as this would take so many interperson reactions the benefit needs to be large enough to make up for the time it takes if there aren't so many people just can just find anyone a tier below yourself.

Pack mules should pay for themselves quickly for miners. Might help.

Just having food and water to rest after battles with is annoying to most people. It will be easy to make it about as exciting as most professions are but that's not saying much.

True, but I take Harvest Moon as a proof-of-concept. Cutting down the food requirement to 1 meal per day that you log in might make things more forgiving. It would also make travel more interesting if you could forage for food.

If you are traveling for more than a day something is very wrong. It's nice for immersion but horrible in every other aspect.

Now, if you combine the foraging skill with my idea for food and water only being an issue when you were away from easy access (expedition mode,) you'd have a progressive mechanism for how far from city centers players could go other than that the monsters get tougher~

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 will encourage the formation of "companies" or what-have-you to exploit this resource. Probably not a bad thing, either.

Fixed for you.

The idea of greifers in a free-form world like this would require guards. If we require that they be PC guards, that'd be an easy way to make money. It would also be boring. Possibly hiring NPC guards would help. I'd like to make the point that greifing should be hard to do in these worlds. That'd help some.

Nobody tries to make griefing easy.

[Asehujiko]

Yes, a Gmod MMO would be a quite appropriate title. However i would like to see a couple of things changed:
No no indestructible welds. If i hit the knee join on a walker robot with a rocket launcher is should break. No unbreakable parts too. The translucent bathtubs used as visor are getting a bit ridiculous.
Resource scarcity. Players should be limited by their production capabilities and not the amount of RAM they have. If you want a tank, you should work for your armor plating.

Ideally, most players should be able to fairly quickly gather the materials for a basic car to get around the world and have enough left to build a house while large mechs and castles remain a clan effort.

For internal mechanics, there was some steam engineering game linked here a while back and some other game set in ancient egypt where you get to design your own mechanisms i can't remember the name of.

[Poltifar]

I have to agree with Shoku this time, PG is definitely the way forward. Although I still don't expect the stories created through PG to be perfect, it would be a step up from what is normally found in MMOs.

As for Asehujiko's Gmod MMO idea, although it would be really nice, I think its still unfeasible for hardware reasons. I don't think anything less than some incredibly powerful supercomputers running a VERY large world could have enough space and RAM to manage thousands of players building hundreds of very complex things each. That's why its way better to play it on LAN for now, with small, non-persistent maps and few players. Even like this my Dual Core 1.8 GHz 4Gb RAM laptop keeps crashing quite regularly.