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[Asehujiko]

Laptop CPU's are always notably less powerful then desktop cores and 1.8ghz is quite old either way. Source predates PhysX, forcing almost everything over the CPU, forming a massive bottleneck there. Newer platforms don't have that problem. As for the world, nobody needs to stream it all at the same time and it's going to be a niche game anyway so there will be a decent amount of open ground with nothing on it that doesn't need calculation beyond it's existence. And since we are going to tear it up with huge machines anyway, the terrain doesn't need the same amount of detail as most Source games. A decent render farm would cope as long as nobody starts doing crazy things on purpose or it gets very popular but then we can actually buy a Roadrunner for it anyway.

[bjlong]

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.

I'm not entirely sure that I follow you, but I think you see ways that we can balance the learning curve so that novices etc can make useful, if not top-quality stuff.

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~

Traveling for more than a day is necessary for the idea of true wildernesses. That said, if you travel in civilized places, you should come across hamlets very, very often.

And the foraging thing? That was my idea. It'd also help with "guides" as a way to make money.

Nobody tries to make griefing easy.

Yeah, but we could make greifing-prone activities time consuming--for example, mining. This would be in the spirit of the game and allow guards etc to be effective.

[Sowelu]

I recommend you look at the history of A Tale in the Desert to see how very long trips work out in that game.  It's actually quite interesting.  The world is huge and it would actually take about a day or two to walk from north Egypt to south Egypt if you had a straight line to walk on (which you rarely do).

There's about ten chariot stops in the world.  In the first 'telling' (it's on the fourth restart right now), when you were offline, you could set your character to do mundane actions...harvest crops that you've harvested before, at about 1/10 the speed you would if you were online; you could also accumulate travel time, and spend it to travel from one chariot stop to another.  That was the only way to teleport, period.

In later tellings, chariots would occasionally make free runs, but you had to wait for up to half an hour to catch one sometimes.  Also, later on, they added "expedition points" that you could set at your home, or some other spot like a mine, and teleport there--but the number of points you could set for teleporting was VERY limited, and there were some distance restrictions I think on how far you could teleport to one.

Early on, roads didn't improve your movement speed; they do, now.  Also, stats slightly increase your move speed, but stat boost are really only possible to get by completing certain long-term, competitive quests.

The time it took to get anywhere in the game was *THE* biggest complaint about it.  Lots of people liked the atmosphere, but really, every telling, upwards of 2/3 of the population would always say "Ugh, walking is still too slow!"  Because when you had new technologies to go learn from universities, you could plan to walk for a few hours to make the rounds.  Need to go gather some quicksilver?  There's just a couple spots--plan for a couple-hour trip.  Want to trade with one of the big player organizations?  Well, how far away is their trading center?  Of course, most trade centers were right near chariot stops, but there were plenty of places in the world that were 4+ hours away from the nearest chariot stop.  It wasn't a big challenge to get somewhere that maybe a handful of players had ever seen in their lives--IF you wanted to spend the time.  Easy to build a home in the middle of nowhere.

ATITD had an awesome system for crafting, too, in that it often relied on player skill to a huge degree--even axes for chopping wood had quality modifiers from around 500 (or so?) to 9999, and when you made one, you dropped into a minigame where you hammered it into the right shape, and only had a limited number of strikes based on how good the material was.  You could reclaim the material as many times as you wanted, before the axe was done, then it was locked in.  Similarly glassmaking puzzles, all kinds of stuff.  It was balanced, new players could make their own stuff with practice and trade it to other new players, but the demand for the GOOD stuff was based on "how much time do the truly excellent players want to spend making axes for everyone else".

Now, with the number of people complaining about travel times, I also want to add something else about ATITD.  I took an informal poll one time, back when I was still a big player of it.  And over half of its population was unemployable.  A big part of its playerbase were retired, some disabled vets, people in wheelchairs, or just ridiculously huge aspergers syndrome cases (hey, no arguments about that--the point is they couldn't hold a job).  Lots of them were on some sort of welfare, and don't whine about them wasting money on MMOs, it's cheaper per month than seeing a couple movies.  Now, these people MADE ATITD into their day-job, so they could feel like they were at least busy with something.  That's important to do.  But please, recognize what kind of playerbase these ideas will appeal to:  The kind of playerbase that has nothing but time.

[Andir]

...

Just because the world is huge doesn't mean there's simply hours of traveling.  The biggest problem I have with instant travel is that it trivializes so much of the game.  If each region had content enough for you to never have to leave, that's ideal.  You then gain a preference to that area that style, the players, and the items.

I'd even go as far as to say that you could have different skills in different areas.  Take Guild Wars' skill learning mechanism.  Skills could be learned from local mobs... heck, I'd say all skills would have to be learned by fighting mobs that use them or training/watching merchants/crafters that use them.  If you wanted to get all the skills in the game, you'd have to travel to the far edges of the world, but they might not be useful to you in your home region.  I'm thinking of spell types, resistances, etc.  If your region is surrounded by volcanoes, magma men and such, you'll likely have fire based skills or have a high resistance to fire.  Someone coming from an icy area may not be as effective in that region, but they can learn the skills simply by spending time there, but it has no real advantage in their homeland.  If you were in a highly forested region you may pick up a thorn (or thorn throwing) spell that's particularly effective vs plant foes, but would be less effective to magma men or a stone golem.

I love the idea of huge worlds with huge distances in between.  Not for time-sink purposes, but for regional pride, originality, trade and all the things that come with it.  If you want to play with a friend/guild, either have them start in your area or travel to you the hard way... if they can make it through the upper level areas they'd likely pass to do it.  If you wanted though, you should be able to go from 0-max level without having to travel all over the world.  If you wanted to trade resources between areas, you could even do that.  The "lava stones" you collect from the fire lands might be useful to a blacksmith in the icy lands because it's better at holding a flame than the wood they have.

[Sowelu]

Ooo, that's an idea I really wanted to do myself, based on that whole "Get different skills from different places" thing.

A long time ago I had an idea for a level-less system that was entirely quest and story based.  You'd have a wide variety of quests you could take, ranging in effort from four hours to fifty.  When you took a quest, instead of XP you got a list of advantages and disadvantages it could give you; you gain the advantage when you finish the quest, but you could pick a disadvantage beforehand and suffer it during the story if you prefer, maybe getting some slight bonus for that.  (Getting most of the way through and failing would still give you the advantages/disadvantages, but would give you some morale debuff for a while after.)

So, a quest that has you fighting monsters in ice caves could give you normal fighting stuff...it could give you advantages fighting in icy terrain, HP boosts, it could boost your ice magic or sap your fire magic, stuff like that, and you choose what you want to get out of it from a list based on what happens or could happen in the quest.  If you want to learn a new technique, you have to pay for it with a penalty, so you could say "I want to learn this new move, and I'm willing to take a limp as payment and pay that off later"...the engine tweaks the events in the quest so you take a plot injury just before you fight the Big Bad, and then grants you your new technique at the start or middle of the last fight (with a brief pause to let you say something or pose heroically).

Generally you'd form parties based on overlapping quests--your priest wants to purge an ancient ruin (any ancient ruin), and plans to boost his 'turn undead' immensely at the cost of life-drain vulnerability; your thief wants to steal the big thing from the basement, choosing to gain disarm-traps but take on a curse that haunts him, your healer just wants to protect three or more other people on a long quest, gaining minor combat magic but losing even more physical ability, your knight is working on his "kill 100 evil beings of a certain strength" and wants to trade his 'dishonored' disadvantage for a nasty scar on his face.

Ideally, minor quests would make you balance out your advantages and disadvantages perfectly, but major quests would let you buy a 10-point advantage and only pay 9 points in disadvantages--so you accumulate profit over time.  Of course many weaknesses would not give you a big disadvantage; a penalty fighting in jungle terrain is not worth much because you can just stay out of the jungle, but hey, it's not too bad to stock up on those.

Naturally, if you wanted to learn different fighting styles or magic schools, you'd learn them from different places.  If you learn basic fighting techniques from three different cultures, you'd come out better than someone who only learned them from one.

[Shoku]

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.

I'm not entirely sure that I follow you, but I think you see ways that we can balance the learning curve so that novices etc can make useful, if not top-quality stuff.

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~

Traveling for more than a day is necessary for the idea of true wildernesses. That said, if you travel in civilized places, you should come across hamlets very, very often.

And the foraging thing? That was my idea. It'd also help with "guides" as a way to make money.

Then game days should consist of only a few hours.

Nobody tries to make griefing easy.

Yeah, but we could make greifing-prone activities time consuming--for example, mining. This would be in the spirit of the game and allow guards etc to be effective.

I'd recommend just making it so that the first strike of the earth took longer but once you had actually started a mine shaft it progressed at a more reasonable rate so that people could actually reasonably dig around in search of interesting materials. You might get players starting a mine a distance away and then tunneling up near the town and then digging another tunnel over to the dam that went right up near the water as a ditch so that they could mine out what was blocking both in a short time interval but that still would take quite a lot of effort compared to mining through the dam wall and if the town guards listen to the ground for approaching armies and such it probably wouldn't go totally unnoticed.

...

Just because the world is huge doesn't mean there's simply hours of traveling.  The biggest problem I have with instant travel is that it trivializes so much of the game.  If each region had content enough for you to never have to leave, that's ideal.  You then gain a preference to that area that style, the players, and the items.

So hopefully it simply just doesn't attract any people who live near enough each other in real life that they might want to play the game together?

What instant travel trivializes is the tedious trouble of walking around. There's a huge volume of complaints about grinding skill levels and such yet followed right on the tail of that comes the suggestion that we should have to grind our position on the map. It's madness I tell you

I'd even go as far as to say that you could have different skills in different areas.  Take Guild Wars' skill learning mechanism.  Skills could be learned from local mobs... heck, I'd say all skills would have to be learned by fighting mobs that use them or training/watching merchants/crafters that use them.  If you wanted to get all the skills in the game, you'd have to travel to the far edges of the world, but they might not be useful to you in your home region.  I'm thinking of spell types, resistances, etc.  If your region is surrounded by volcanoes, magma men and such, you'll likely have fire based skills or have a high resistance to fire.  Someone coming from an icy area may not be as effective in that region, but they can learn the skills simply by spending time there, but it has no real advantage in their homeland.  If you were in a highly forested region you may pick up a thorn (or thorn throwing) spell that's particularly effective vs plant foes, but would be less effective to magma men or a stone golem.

I rather like this idea.

I love the idea of huge worlds with huge distances in between.  Not for time-sink purposes, but for regional pride, originality, trade and all the things that come with it.

If you add teleporting to a game that has those things it won't take them away, just don't teleport regional pride, flavor, or trade goods.

If you want to play with a friend/guild, either have them start in your area or travel to you the hard way... if they can make it through the upper level areas they'd likely pass to do it.

Have you ever had to do that?

If you wanted though, you should be able to go from 0-max level without having to travel all over the world.  If you wanted to trade resources between areas, you could even do that.  The "lava stones" you collect from the fire lands might be useful to a blacksmith in the icy lands because it's better at holding a flame than the wood they have.

Which is a great reason to just not allow teleporting trade goods. Players can spot a commodity and then be very merchantly about deciding what it will take to make the trip worth their effort and then actually travel these long distances.

You might even make it so they can't use abilities from the old region if they've never taken the long way there so that there's also the consideration about whether or not they care about having those abilities in that location (like if actually making those lava stones into whatever contraption for a blacksmith benefits from some lava stone handling ability- you'd keep the regional flavor by having only travelers from those lands having that skill.)

[Andir]

So hopefully it simply just doesn't attract any people who live near enough each other in real life that they might want to play the game together?

What instant travel trivializes is the tedious trouble of walking around. There's a huge volume of complaints about grinding skill levels and such yet followed right on the tail of that comes the suggestion that we should have to grind our position on the map. It's madness I tell you

If you want to play with someone, I'm sure you can coordinate starting in the same town.  It shouldn't be that hard.  Like I said, you never have to leave your starting region unless you are a game completion nut.  You should have enough content in one region to entertain people.  Only the die hard people who want to get every skill will travel to all ends of the world.

If you add teleporting to a game that has those things it won't take them away, just don't teleport regional pride, flavor, or trade goods.

It trivializes content.  Especially if you do regional skills.  People can just fly all over the world and build up their character as fast as possible because they are reading a player guide that says, "Go kill ___, then port to ___ and kill this until you get ___."

If you want to play with a friend/guild, either have them start in your area or travel to you the hard way... if they can make it through the upper level areas they'd likely pass to do it.

Have you ever had to do that?

Yep, first time in Everquest when my friend started in Qeynos and I started in Freeport.  It was a hell of a run.  In hind sight, I should have just re-rolled, but it was kind of fun seeing all the cool stuff for the first time.

All I'm saying is that every game that included teleporters has ruined the world.

[Shoku]

So hopefully it simply just doesn't attract any people who live near enough each other in real life that they might want to play the game together?

What instant travel trivializes is the tedious trouble of walking around. There's a huge volume of complaints about grinding skill levels and such yet followed right on the tail of that comes the suggestion that we should have to grind our position on the map. It's madness I tell you

If you want to play with someone, I'm sure you can coordinate starting in the same town.  It shouldn't be that hard.  Like I said, you never have to leave your starting region unless you are a game completion nut.  You should have enough content in one region to entertain people.  Only the die hard people who want to get every skill will travel to all ends of the world.

If you add teleporting to a game that has those things it won't take them away, just don't teleport regional pride, flavor, or trade goods.

It trivializes content.  Especially if you do regional skills.  People can just fly all over the world and build up their character as fast as possible because they are reading a player guide that says, "Go kill ___, then port to ___ and kill this until you get ___."

No, I explained how you could keep them from using teleport for that. You could technically learn them all that way but you couldn't use them outside the region with teleports so you don't gain anything but some sight seeing and average viability in another area.

If you want to play with a friend/guild, either have them start in your area or travel to you the hard way... if they can make it through the upper level areas they'd likely pass to do it.

Have you ever had to do that?

Yep, first time in Everquest when my friend started in Qeynos and I started in Freeport.  It was a hell of a run.  In hind sight, I should have just re-rolled, but it was kind of fun seeing all the cool stuff for the first time.

All I'm saying is that every game that included teleporters has ruined the world.

Why didn't you start in Qeynos with your friend so you wouldn't even have to reroll?

[Andir]

So hopefully it simply just doesn't attract any people who live near enough each other in real life that they might want to play the game together?

What instant travel trivializes is the tedious trouble of walking around. There's a huge volume of complaints about grinding skill levels and such yet followed right on the tail of that comes the suggestion that we should have to grind our position on the map. It's madness I tell you

If you want to play with someone, I'm sure you can coordinate starting in the same town.  It shouldn't be that hard.  Like I said, you never have to leave your starting region unless you are a game completion nut.  You should have enough content in one region to entertain people.  Only the die hard people who want to get every skill will travel to all ends of the world.

If you add teleporting to a game that has those things it won't take them away, just don't teleport regional pride, flavor, or trade goods.

It trivializes content.  Especially if you do regional skills.  People can just fly all over the world and build up their character as fast as possible because they are reading a player guide that says, "Go kill ___, then port to ___ and kill this until you get ___."

No, I explained how you could keep them from using teleport for that. You could technically learn them all that way but you couldn't use them outside the region with teleports so you don't gain anything but some sight seeing and average viability in another area.

Do you realize how awkwardly artificial that is?  What's the point of having different regions if you can't travel to the ends of the world to acquire all the skills if you want (and be able to use them)?  I'm saying, have multiple regions, have skills for each region, make it possible for someone to "live" in one region their entire game if they want and if they feel adventurous or get bored they can make the trek to another part of the world  It's not required, but it will make them a more rounded character.  It will give the power gamers something to do...maybe even add "prestige class" like titles.

I've already stressed how much I dislike people that think they deserve the right to see all content without some time spent in the game.  Why do you feel the need to bring power gamers down to your level?

If you want to play with a friend/guild, either have them start in your area or travel to you the hard way... if they can make it through the upper level areas they'd likely pass to do it.

Have you ever had to do that?

Yep, first time in Everquest when my friend started in Qeynos and I started in Freeport.  It was a hell of a run.  In hind sight, I should have just re-rolled, but it was kind of fun seeing all the cool stuff for the first time.

All I'm saying is that every game that included teleporters has ruined the world.

Why didn't you start in Qeynos with your friend so you wouldn't even have to reroll?

Because I didn't look at the start town?  It's pretty trivial to make a new character... Freeport was the default city, he chose a different one.  I was eager to start the game and check it out and I just clicked through.  We had no voice chat at the time... do I need more excuses?  None of them matter though.  If you want to play with your friend today all he has to say is, "Start in ____ town."  Problem solved.  I don't get what you are trying to prove...

[Shoku]

So hopefully it simply just doesn't attract any people who live near enough each other in real life that they might want to play the game together?

What instant travel trivializes is the tedious trouble of walking around. There's a huge volume of complaints about grinding skill levels and such yet followed right on the tail of that comes the suggestion that we should have to grind our position on the map. It's madness I tell you

If you want to play with someone, I'm sure you can coordinate starting in the same town.  It shouldn't be that hard.  Like I said, you never have to leave your starting region unless you are a game completion nut.  You should have enough content in one region to entertain people.  Only the die hard people who want to get every skill will travel to all ends of the world.

If you add teleporting to a game that has those things it won't take them away, just don't teleport regional pride, flavor, or trade goods.

It trivializes content.  Especially if you do regional skills.  People can just fly all over the world and build up their character as fast as possible because they are reading a player guide that says, "Go kill ___, then port to ___ and kill this until you get ___."

No, I explained how you could keep them from using teleport for that. You could technically learn them all that way but you couldn't use them outside the region with teleports so you don't gain anything but some sight seeing and average viability in another area.

Do you realize how awkwardly artificial that is?  What's the point of having different regions if you can't travel to the ends of the world to acquire all the skills if you want (and be able to use them)?  I'm saying, have multiple regions, have skills for each region, make it possible for someone to "live" in one region their entire game if they want and if they feel adventurous or get bored they can make the trek to another part of the world  It's not required, but it will make them a more rounded character.  It will give the power gamers something to do...maybe even add "prestige class" like titles.

I've already stressed how much I dislike people that think they deserve the right to see all content without some time spent in the game.  Why do you feel the need to bring power gamers down to your level?

Why don't you want to grind levels and skills?

I'm not saying that you can't have nonregional skills in an area. Think of it like having one character that is several characters. If you travel to a place the hard way you would merge your experiences from both of those areas but teleporting grants no such meshing of the regional flavor.

Story wise you could call it some kind of bloodline thing and maybe have the merge take place at some kind of altar as you worked your way up to godhood or whatever power goal the game presented. Regional things stay regional and generic toughness and that sort of thing would take the same time and effort to increase do all of the related tasks in a dozen regions' beginner areas as just progressing steadily in one region.

One really important thing is that you be able to change the flavor of the area you play in without having to play another five hours to hit some benchmark so you can move into the next area as soon as possible from being sick of the one you are in-
I brought that up as a segway into the other thing you said because it doesn't really matter me. Really as long as I don't seem to be taking a step forward and then taking a step backwards you can watch me plod along at whatever pace I'm achieving hours and hours at a time. I regularly lay in bed all day on my laptop only getting up to use the bathroom, fix some soup, or maybe see how popular the bird feeders on the tree in my back yard are if I've really over taxed my eyes and need to wait awhile so text is a little less blurry.

As a powergamer I wreck games. Not really on purpose, it just sort of happens if I get the right opportunities through luck but with the way luck goes I'm never very far from the point where it could be a problem. I only played Everquest until level 30 because the account I was playing on found itself unpaid but a few months later you would have probably seen me and two other wizards pulling dragons onto unsuspecting groups so that we could all unleash our very long cooldown brain-nuke on it and walk off with the spoils that only caused the death of half of a large group we probably didn't know. That kind of thing was an option and I would have done it just so I could say I 3manned a dragon. I ran all over the world just because I couldn't find a place where the leveling seemed like the right difficulty (hopped on the boat, dicked around and fell off the boat, used the boat to get back to my body but died from exhaustion again, finally got some breath water buff and caught the boat yet again and resolved to sit still for an hour until I got where it was going.)
And now that games usually have an achievement list I get everything on it that seems remotely attainable, and maybe some of the things that look nearly impossible if I don't have something else to be doing.

But other people aren't like that and when you talk about an MMO those people are pretty important, otherwise we'd just see a bunch of elder scrolls clones instead of all of the commercial giants spending a fortune to have these gigantic connection contraptions relay complex data between fifty players in low population zones where most of them aren't even talking to each other.

So I am talking all of this design paradigm because I don't want to run around a huge world if it is empty.

If you want to play with a friend/guild, either have them start in your area or travel to you the hard way... if they can make it through the upper level areas they'd likely pass to do it.

Have you ever had to do that?

Yep, first time in Everquest when my friend started in Qeynos and I started in Freeport.  It was a hell of a run.  In hind sight, I should have just re-rolled, but it was kind of fun seeing all the cool stuff for the first time.

All I'm saying is that every game that included teleporters has ruined the world.

Why didn't you start in Qeynos with your friend so you wouldn't even have to reroll?

Because I didn't look at the start town?  It's pretty trivial to make a new character... Freeport was the default city, he chose a different one.  I was eager to start the game and check it out and I just clicked through.  We had no voice chat at the time... do I need more excuses?  None of them matter though.  If you want to play with your friend today all he has to say is, "Start in ____ town."  Problem solved.  I don't get what you are trying to prove...

Prove? I thought we were just talking about the pros and cons of game mechanisms in the down time between eureka moments for proposing things that haven't even been tested anywhere yet.

I oppose people when I see the chance. This isn't to be a dick but to coax them into showing their reasoning behind claims and opinions. When people don't have to defend an idea you tend to see a lot of ideas that are basically garbage, yet it takes so little effort to refine them just a bit and the only cost I see to this is that from time to time people get upset because they can't handle criticism, either in general or just at a bad time I happened to catch them. I don't see any major harm in that though.

[Andir]

Eh, I'm tired/grumpy.  I should have been in bed over 4 hours ago...

Normally when I get into conversations like this, it's because the have an underlying motive... they try to find a way to make the game trivial to them, or try to deny the meta-game for others because they don't have the time to do it.  I'm just trying to find a way to entertain those that "finish" an area and are looking for more without trivializing all the old content by introducing all new areas that outclass the old.  I also hate the idea that I'd spend time working up a skill that was pointless because of where I was in the world.

[Poltifar]

Ooo, that's an idea I really wanted to do myself, based on that whole "Get different skills from different places" thing.

[idea]

Your quest system seems very nice, but honestly, I don't think it would work all too well in an MMORPG. Other than the fact that making such flexible quests that can cater to every possibility including other players with other quests participating with you in this quest while doing theres (a party), there is always the problem of the hardcore metagamers that will exploit the system in every way possible. I doubt that this system can be made truly balanced and unexploitable, so their will always be the min-maxers that ruin the game's fun for everyone else ("You didnt do the Save the Queen quest choosing the second disadvantage and the first advantage followed by doing the Magma Depths quest choosing the 4th advantage and the 3rd disadvantage? OMG, such a n00b. Go away n00b, make a new character and do those like that, its the only way to be a good player in this game.").

On the other hand, such a kind of game is already possible, albeit not n MMORPG format: tabletop gaming (or irc gaming of such game). All the RP games like DnD and GURPS and all the others have something very close to what you describe. As long as its a human GM catering to the needs of only a few players, it can be a great game. What does that mean in the end? I don't know... maybe that we'll get the MMORPG you described when we have super-intelligent AI GMs? Until then, I'm sticking to tabletop games for the experience you described.

[Shoku]

Ooo, that's an idea I really wanted to do myself, based on that whole "Get different skills from different places" thing.

[idea]

Your quest system seems very nice, but honestly, I don't think it would work all too well in an MMORPG. Other than the fact that making such flexible quests that can cater to every possibility including other players with other quests participating with you in this quest while doing theres (a party), there is always the problem of the hardcore metagamers that will exploit the system in every way possible. I doubt that this system can be made truly balanced and unexploitable, so their will always be the min-maxers that ruin the game's fun for everyone else ("You didnt do the Save the Queen quest choosing the second disadvantage and the first advantage followed by doing the Magma Depths quest choosing the 4th advantage and the 3rd disadvantage? OMG, such a n00b. Go away n00b, make a new character and do those like that, its the only way to be a good player in this game.").

On the other hand, such a kind of game is already possible, albeit not n MMORPG format: tabletop gaming (or irc gaming of such game). All the RP games like DnD and GURPS and all the others have something very close to what you describe. As long as its a human GM catering to the needs of only a few players, it can be a great game. What does that mean in the end? I don't know... maybe that we'll get the MMORPG you described when we have super-intelligent AI GMs? Until then, I'm sticking to tabletop games for the experience you described.

I think that issue was why he had the bit about the warrior type taking a scar to get rid of a different penalty.

"You've got some nasty penalties for raiding the gods of the jungle, if you don't become weak to cold you're probably going to have to pick up the pedophilia penalty."
"Stuff like that is in the game!?"
"No, go get the f***ing cold penalties."

[Sowelu]

Yeah, the idea in mine is that your advantages and disadvantages are fluid, and given enough questing, you can turn anything into anything else.  So yeah, you can build your badass warrior and then eventually build some personal plotlines that give combat disadvantages and give minor healing abilities, and keep doing that until you've got the character you want.  The big quests let you have more points in advantages than you have in disadvantages, and you'd keep that benefit if you start retooling.

Doesn't mean you won't have a bunch of clones of the same build, but meh.

Ideally, you'd have a BUNCH of different penalties that are less-obvious, but I don't know how easily that would work.  I like to think of people who get a penalty if they haven't spent one of the last couple nights sleeping in a real bed, haven't eaten their favorite food in a week, etc...plenty of the disadvantages you could take would be stupid and trifling and easy to exploit, but you still had to take a quest to take on that penalty (and the advantage you bought with it), so it's not all bad.

[bjlong]

One way to make regional skills without the metagamey skills-only-work-in-certain-areas while keeping teleporting is making gaining skills time-consuming at first, and making teleporting difficult to have as a commute. For example, you teleport to a new area. You bought a round-trip ticket, so you are given a ticket stub. That's it, that's all you have. That and some equipment.

You head to the local dojo, where the master hemms and haws about making you his student, and tells you to come back tomorrow.

You head back, and check the ticket prices for tomorrow. You notice that ticket prices have gone up significantly. The teller says that because you teleported recently, that makes teleportation more difficult. This could be an exponential effect, which means even power gamers would have trouble after some time.

You go to your local dojo, and the guy there hems and haws, and tells you to come back tomorrow. After a few days or weeks of standing around and maybe performing menial tasks, he declares you "worthy" and you become his student. Now you can start learning! You wouldn't have been able to keep this up at that other dojo.

Here's the thing, though. After you become an accomplished student, you should be able to 'port to a dojo for a day to learn some, possibly gaining a boost to your fighting abilities, possibly gaining a new skill. The waiting period would only have to be done if you were "unaccomplished." Similar stuffs can be done with crafting.