"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.
:/
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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?