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[Cheese]

This is why I think it would be interesting to make this into a DF based MMO; if your civilisations main source of ores runs out, an embark group might be sent out to set up a new city-fort to exploit some mountain that's rumoured to have many good quality ores. This fort would then export ores and supply to the other forts, importing whatever it needs to mine. Perhaps it doesn't have any magma at reasonable levels and hence can't smelt or craft the ores and hence has to send it somewhere it can be smelted.

[Zangi]

An addition to your thing...

#9: Basic in-game justice/law/gov't groundwork for each town/village/kingdom.  It does not do anything by itself, ever.  But, players can via for control of this justice/law/gov't groundwork for their own use or for the betterment of its people. 
Players can try to establish a 'kingdom' and work to 'persuade' all the neighboring towns/villages to submit to the laws and influence of the 'kingdom'. 
As for how this justice/law/gov't system works?  It basically legitimizes player appointed marshals or sanctioned bounty hunters to 'do justice' in the name of the town/village/kingdom, after a player has been charged and found guilty / not paying a bribe to keep off the radar.

"But its a dangerous job!"  You may whine. 
Allow the governing body to give life insurance to its 'employees'.  Upon death, the next of kin(the successor character) will get a money/equipment boost for the loss of the relative.
Optional health insurance, permanent wounds, sum payment in compensation.

#10: As for funding this stuff... taxes!  Or racketeering!  Or bribes!  ...  You can do all 3!
It seems this game would need an actual NPC population, that players would need to protect as their primary tax/workforce source...

Of course, there will be benefits for the murder and looting of NPC.  Like trying to weaken another kingdom/town/village base.

Bleed the peasants dry, but protect them for they are your property.  Take as much in bribes from other players as possible. Feared by the NPC.  Prosper.
Alternatively, become a bastion of law order and justice.  Crack down on wrong doing and corruption.  Respected by the NPC. Prosper.
Another alternative, take care of the people, providing for and protecting them, lenience and understanding, won't hurt to bend the rules, maybe get some grease to move the cogs.  Loved by the NPC.  Prosper.

Yes, NPCs that matter in the way that they are limited in number and actually useful for things. Players can try to commit genocide upon all the dwarves of the world if they so choose.  Maybe succeed...

[Virex]

Yes, Pillow, that is exactly what I said and how I said it.  Your powers of mimicry are without equal.

I just looked through one of the Haven & Hearth threads and it seems no one wants to play it anymore because of constant annoyances (mostly from other players) as well as a lot of grinding (one of the things I detest most about these games).  I'll probably give it a try sometime soon, but any game where the only way to survive is to make sure no one knows you're there or that you have anything valuable doesn't really sound like what I'm looking for.  We'll see what happens when I try it.

Erm, I don't see how one can have scarcity without grinding? I mean the directly available pool of resources would quickly bleed dry and then players are spending days looking for a tree to cut down. Seems like a contradiction in interests to me...

[Sappho]

Instead of grinding to level up skills, there would be some kind of practice objects or NPCs (the minigames I referred to).  And I don't mean that resources should be so scarce that they're impossible to find.  I would have the world be truly massive, and some areas be rich only in certain resources.  One area is surrounded by forest, one by mountains with certain types of rock, one by caves with veins of a particular metal, etc.  So you couldn't collect everything you want by going just outside your village - you'd have to rely on trade for resources that don't exist in your area, or else travel far and wide to gather them all.

Again, it can be compared with real life.  Trees take years to grow back, yet there are enough that we're constantly consuming wood.  You just have to import the wood from an area rich in it.  A forest would have enough trees to keep people going for a long time.  If there end up being so many players that there's a massive shortage, an admin or mod could plant a new forest somewhere to keep things fair.

[Nilocy]

You know, I'd like to play an MMO where its exactly like real life in every single way so I didn't have to actually do anything in real life! Also I have to pay for it!!!

[Sappho]

Thank you very much for your constructive contribution, Nilocy.  Next time please feel free to simply say "I wouldn't be interested in this game."  Or even ignore the thread entirely if you find it so disdainful.

Not that it matters overmuch, but there is a certain attraction to realism in games that many people have (including myself) - but not absolute realism.  A game world has rules that can be learned easily.  The real world is not so easy to figure out.  In a game, you can be who you like and do things you could never do in real life, especially if you have some sort of disability.  You can create a new identity which is nothing like who you are in the real world, much the same way a writer can live vicariously through the characters they create in their stories.  Would I want to waste away my whole life playing a game on the computer?  Absolutely not.  (This is why I avoid games like "the sims" and try to take healthy breaks from DF on a regular basis.)  But a game like the one I described, realistic enough to make sense without being as chaotic and confusing as reality, would offer me an outlet I can't get in the real world.  I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels this way, though of course I wouldn't expect my game to be a perfect fit for everyone's gaming needs.

[Vattic]

I agree with most of your points Sappho and have also been thinking about the same kinds of things since playing Hazordhu.

I do have a comment about #6; I understand that you're describing your dream MMO but forcing players into one role at a time would likely stifle players and settlements.

Firstly I'd want a skill system where you have a limited number of points to distribute. Unlike most RPGs you'd distribute your points through action. You'd be able to excel at two or three jobs but still have basic skill in the others. Some jobs would be non-skilled. If you wanted you could focus on one job and have all your points vested in it and be the best smith in the land say. This would encourage specialisation but not require it to the point where small settlements find it hard to get off the ground.

I think a character should be able to have both combat and non-combat skills without them impacting too much on each other. Once again this is for gameplay reasons. I don't want to see areas of the game locked away from you because your settlement needs a baker and you got nominated.

One, somewhat controversial, feature I'd like to see is NPCs that you can give basic orders to. The problem with a lot of persistent world MMO games is that your home can be destroyed while your sleeping. Having NPC guards could solve this problem but to balance it you'd have to provide them with food, water, lodgings, and maybe even money. The only problem with this is that it might ruin RP but ideally there would be rules for their use to limit the damage.

On the topic of H&H, I played early on and follow the updates but the grind got to me. I also don't like the super players who play all the time and are almost untouchable hence why I like reasonable skill caps; we're all supposed to be, almost, human after all.

[Rakonas]

Reading the OP, several of the points made me think of Puzzle Pirates, most obvious being the minigames, but there's resource scarcity, exploration, skills getting better depending on how well you do them, though someone just starting can do better than someone who has been playing for a long time, and so on. Personally I haven't played it in a long time as I get bored of puzzles, though many of them are very fun, and ships can be permanently destroyed while sunk, and crew can lose limbs (though it's actually something sought after, not a penalty) if they sink.

[Andir]

One, somewhat controversial, feature I'd like to see is NPCs that you can give basic orders to. The problem with a lot of persistent world MMO games is that your home can be destroyed while your sleeping. Having NPC guards could solve this problem but to balance it you'd have to provide them with food, water, lodgings, and maybe even money. The only problem with this is that it might ruin RP but ideally there would be rules for their use to limit the damage.

The biggest break from RP is being able to vanish from the world at any point in time.  I think being able to hire goons to guard a certain area is a perfectly valid stand for when you have to sleep in real life.  I've always liked the idea of having the ability to maintain guard staff, sales staff, and even miners or a smithy.  You should be able to supplement your down time in whatever way you like.  If you are in a fairly secure area around friends who are guarding an area with their NPCs and you can concentrate on supporting your NPC smithy to make items for trade to them for protection or sale to passing travelers then you should be able to.  Ideally, you could hire a set of NPCs to also handle making food but they should not be able to sustain your homestead on their own.  You should have to sink something into the area to maintain their services, be it money to buy supplies, food stuff or other resources.

[sonerohi]

Most games don't have consequences for the players actions that are significant in any way. I want to see a game where players band together to fight the big bad boss dragon, and then feel the ire of the server when they kill it whilst it is airborne, and it plows through a city block, permanently killing some quest giving NPCs and requiring a massive and expensive rebuild.

[Zangi]

@sonerohi: Yea, but I figure if quest NPCs are killable.  All NPC including newly generated ones should be able to give a quest, even if its the same one.  You'll have to find the new quest NPC out in the world. 
Murder the NPC after you complete the quest.
Fun times with 'destructible cities'.

@Andir/Vattic:
Hired NPC guards to protect the holdings?  Yes.
But, still trivial, especially if its a group of griefers.  The deed will still probably be all done and finished in 10 minutes time without a peep to the world.  Unless news of the attack, gets to the local 'sheriffs' and 'vigilantes' and they respond in time... 
Most unlikely.  There is still doing the dirty deeds when the server is 'asleep' and/or bribing away the 'sheriffs' to look the other way...

[Sergius]

2. Permadeath and Aging

This is the basis of the MMO I have on paper. There's an important part to it tho: Losing is Fun.
In order to have people not ragequit when dying, you have to make dying a vital (pardon the pun) part of the game. There should be some upside to dying (in some cases, dying may be necessary). How do I imagine such a system? For one, I separate the player "character" from the player entity, which I guess you could call a "soul". Whenever you die, you have a lot of options to play again - depending on playstyle. If you had your own children, you can continue play as one of them. Or take a random basic non-plot NPC and take over it, "evolving" it pokemon-style into Player Character status (note that the game has a population of NPCs of various levels, ranging from actual walking people to statistics in a town). Maybe you could get a heirloom item from the previous PC (most items should be unimportant and trivial - except for maybe one or two named items, getting fully outfitted in Plate Mail armor is easy). And in the worst case scenario, if part of your playerbase is so adamant against reincarnating, let them create a "clone" character of the last one... basically a char that rolled the same stats.

Heck, if you don't want to die, just "retire" and let your old character become a NPC (who will go on and do NPCey stuff like becoming a blacksmith or a king ).

Now, back to the part where there's a point (bonus?) to dying: there were a few ways to do this, but my idea was to have some sort of "unlock" system where the player "soul" gets abilities it can apply to his characters, but only on reincarnating. How to actually unlock or what it is there to unlock, depended on tasks you accomplished while being alive. This may include skills, professions, technologies, I dunno. I'm thinking it could be kinda like a single-character-per-player game of Civilization.

Yeah, aging would be a cause of death. Also there could be artificial means of longevity, with certain limits (you could play a character that wants to live forever and end up being a 500 year old epic cyborg lich or something that gets killed eventually by a bunch of heroes and his left pinky becomes a priceless artifact ).

About the story part: the whole point of this was that the story of all characters up to their death and who they fathered, was stored sort of in a DF way: as Legends that you can access like a blog, and look up other players.

5. Exploration

The world isn't static. Natural disasters could change the landscape permanently every lots of years (longer than a generation, at least), moving landmasses and destroying cities. Cities aren't hard-coded either, being created by nameless NPCs by some algorithm, or founded by a party of player adventurers, but gains a life of its own anyway. And if the game is big enough at generation, it could take a reeeeally long time to map completely.

6. Item Variety and Customization

IMO, it would be much cooler, instead of having "awesome loot" like in games such as WoW, a PC could have/make a really cool signature item or two. Since dying would probably mean that you lose most of it (otherwise it would be silly) I would make most of your equipment easy to replace. Then the few signature items could be inherited or something. They could be really really awesomely customizable, and probably require unlocks or help from friends with special skills to make unique items. Or a bunch of players could get together to use all their traits to make said items.

Generic economic resources (iron, mass-produced weapons, food) I probably would handle in a more hands-off way: not make a player craft everything himself. Owning a business and setting production instead of getting carpal tunnel, maybe.

8. Setting

I agree on this about Fantasy Tolkien/D&D type settings being overused. However, part of the charm of this game could be that the setting isn't static. Since characters age and time goes faster than real life, you could have a game spanning hundreds of years. You could even start at a stone age, go thru a Tolkien stage, continue to various RL inspired tech levels (such as steampunk) and maybe end with cyberpunk or space travel or whatever. It could even be an endless cycle (like how a lot of fantasy settings are set after the fall of a high-tech civilization).


An important part of this is the concept of persistence. Here's a good read about it: http://phantasmal.sourceforge.net/DGD/LibWriting/Persistence.html

I think also that the concept of "leveling up" is overused in games. Why do you have to do stuff to be better? Maybe you want to go to college to get awesome scholar skills... but who wants to roleplay 5 years of higher education in a MMO? Maybe you should simply get better over time quickly until you're awesome, regardless of what you do. I think it was an early version of FATE (pen and paper RPG) that allowed you to create your character in stages (usually representing childhood, youth etc) and some people roleplayed said stages, assuming any character group happened in-between with a fixed amount of "points" for each player to spend.

[sonerohi]

I'd rather see an MMO where crafting is a mixture of the players finesse and knowledge, rather than a little ticker that says you have x skill. You can try your hand at whatever, whenever, but if you don't have the right materials, tools, or knowledge, you will make a shoddier product. I'm talking like, a hand crafting system here. I see one of those, I will have cake vision.

[Deon]

It looks like nobody mentioned Faery tale online: www.faerytaleonline.com.

It's currently down but I hope it will be back soon, and it's the closest thing I can offer you. It's browser-based, but it allows most of the stuff (except for depleted resources, but different locations have totally different resources so you have to travel a lot or make supply trains).

That's my story as a player: I was born to a tribe of jackal-men who lived in a desert. I was learning and training with my brothers and sisters, but one day everything ended. I was six years old when I was accused of stealing of our kiln (you can take any objects in your virtual "inventory" because the game is more about story/roleplaying than about actual limitations). I was locked in a shack with another newborn guy. I almost died of hunger because of that, and that small rodent obviously filled his inventory with lots of useful furniture which we had in our "crafting shack" and didn't roleplay anything (childs should emote, they cannot talk normally). I hit him because I was angry... And that was enough to kill him. Magically the room was filled with all the objects he was hiding somehow, but I knew I had no chance to live. Killing of your tribemates was not allowed by our god, so I took a few tools and ran off into the desert. After months of traveling and scavenging for food I saw an ocean. I've spent three years roaming around, and it appeared that we were located on a desert island, surrounded by ocean. Anyway, I was around 12 when I've decided to forget the past and embrace the darkness... I dug out a cave and started to mine rock. For 10 years I was digging underground tunnels, and strange previously unknown creatures started to appear in them. Giant spiders, leeches, huge bats, worms and other vermin started to breed and multiply underground.

I turned the system into a labyrith and made an underground city in its deepest end. There were storage houses, crafting shops, even a town hall of sorts. I've made a few stone houses in my hand-made underdark, but I was alone there. When I was around 20 I've met my older brother with whom we played and trained a lot when I was a small pup. He was exploring, he found my cave and was almost lost there, hehe. He said that I was considered dead, and if not I should be killed, but he didn't want to fight me and promised to say that he didn't see me. However I asked him to deliver a note to our father which he "occasionally found" underground. This way a long (around 1 letter per year) correspondence between me and my father was established. He promised in letters to send "outlaws" to my place instead of killing them, but I've never seen anyone else. Anyway, around 28 y.o. I died from starvation and loneliness (I stopped playing and the character died). We were talking in Personal Messages around the fto forums with the person who player my father (and the founder of our race), and he said that many years later these strange ruins were explored by others of our race, and they rarely sent hunting parties underground to get rare gems and unknown creature trophies.


So yeah, it's very long and doesn't allow "a quick game", but it allows you to participate in grand events and make ones.

[Kiwi]

This is for H&H, The devs are currently working on the LP system (Learning points, = expierence) that you spend on skills of, making it a less grind orientated game.
So, stay tuned, big update should be coming soon