quote:Original post by boolean

quote:Original post by Boku San
Are you still playing ATITD now, boolean?

Actually I just started playing the other night. I might see you in there :D

What''s your name on there? I might pop up, I still got that free 24 hours thing...

Anyway, if you haven''t played it, it''s pretty damned boring IMHO. I don''t think I''m gonna buy it, I think I''ll save that money I would spend for a while until I can buy a car.

And it''s $13.99...I mean, COME ON! I can''t even find people to socialize with anywhere but the Nile!


"TV IS bad Meatwad...but we f***in need it"

If you''re a girl under the age of 12, and you''re high on marijuana...don''t ride your bike. -TRUTH

If you had each world as a "Time Zone" you could use "loose" time.

Say you have 12 epochs. You build a castle in the first epoch at grid 12,12. Now say no one has build anything there till the 5th epoch, where a hut was built the day before (real time). This castle you just build in the first epoch suddenly (or slowly) appears in epoch 2, 3 & 4. Because the hut existed in epoch 5, the castle is assumed to have been destroyed some time between 4 and 5. The next day (real time) and army attacks and destroys the castle in epoch 3, now the castle suddonly dissapears from epoch 4.

An alternate could be that you build the castle in epoch 1 then have to travel to epoch 2 and accumulate enough material to maintatin the castle (quarter the total cost of materisl to build maybe) at which point the castles is assumed to have been maintained between epochs and suddenly appears.

This would give you impact on the world and possibly other worlds at the same time. You could still have battles but you could also have guild whos only goal is to create a shop/chapterhouse in every epoch.

quote:Original post by solinear
OK, the number of problems that you''re going to run into are widely varied. I''ll start at the easy problems to fix.

1) Too much variance in the world means that plot changes won''t apply to all worlds. If the Orcs won the war on this world and the humans won on another, then the worlds aren''t paralell and things would eventually be impossible to design for all worlds. If you make it to where the same events happen on all servers then you''re still making it where the players have no *real* impact on the world. What they did was destined to happen, whether they did it or someone else did.

I had considered this and came up with the ultimate solution -- "who cares"? Especially with the concept of dimensions added, basically. there''s a "main" timeline/storyline, and the individual "worlds" spin off when created. That''s where the history of each would come into play -- when you click on a world to join, it will give a history of the world as it stands when they''re entering it (well-written -- they could have some "flowery text" generator to make the mundane facts sound like a history).

Another thing that could be done is "global logic". Say that on the main server, King Blahblah just lost a large part of his kingdom to Lord Sneezle to the west. To propogate this to the worlds, there could be logic that would check the conditions necessary for this to apply ("if BlahBlah is King of Dinkleberry and Sneezle is Lord of Snoo and Dinkleberry and Snoo are at war, then...")... Obviously the logic would be relatively complex, but multiple conditions could be written depending on the things most likely to happen (or that the creators see has happened in the various worlds) -- and it could be complex, since it wouldn''t REALLY be real-time (unless a battle needed to take place or something, but even then, the logic would just wait for the outcome of the battle to see what happens)

quote:
2) There are too many different play styles. While you (and admittedly many other people) want to not play the "kill lots of stuff" style of game, a lot of people do.

Then this style of game wouldn''t be for them. Remember, this isn''t a game for people who like MMORPGs -- they already HAVE their games. This is a game for people who don''t like them but want to play in an online world, so why would MMO players need to be kept in mind when designing it? I don''t keep people who like playing Sports Games in mind when developing a puzzle game, so why would this be any different?

All of the rest of your ideas (about the XP division and such) are interesting and have merit, BTW -- don''t take their lack of inclusion to mean I''m bashing them.

quote:
3) No real society in the games. The number one (and possibly only) reason that these games are so successful is that the players create their own social entities, whether guilds or just common areas that they hang out in.

See, what I envisioned when I first came up with this is more of a "you''re exploring on your own and come upon two other people who are also exploring" type of thing. Granted, this may take a lot of the "get to know people" stuff out of the game, but that''s what chat rooms are for. Since everyone could have multiple characters in different worlds, there could be a "help wanted" section of the game where people could search if anyone in any world needed a Ranger or whatever. Then, the player could check the world history, and, if he likes it, enter and track down those other guys (each "world" would have multiple entry points, if they need to get close to the other guys -- or they could always send a message saying "Meet me in the tavern in Blingingham")

quote:With only 50 (or even 200) people in a world, there isn''t enough to bypass that ''critical mass'' where the players go from people socializing with each-other because they have no other choice (because there is nobody else there) to socializing because they want to (common goals/interests/whatever). You need no less than something close to 1000 active players per world to actually create this critical mass for the ideal of chosen socialization.

Again, this applies to an MMORPG -- I''m not specifically looking to find a party right off when I play a game -- that''s why I like games like Morrowind -- but I tend to like the "eventually cross paths" style of play, where having a pal or three will make the larger acheivements, well, acheivable.