Kudows @ GroZZleR

UO was the best until statloss...power hour...tremmal/fellucia...garunteed skill gain system, ect. First 2 years of UO...golden.

One of these days im going to write a paper on the do's and dont's of making an MMORPG.

As they stand now the great majority of MMO's just seem like graphical chat rooms. find a group, camp a spawn, chat for hours, gain a level....rinse...repeat. That may work for some poeple but for me!! Theres nothing like forming a guild and hunting PKs to extinction.

Richard Garret! I salute you!

Quote:Original post by Kylotan

At what point does it return to the stone? What about if the person with the sword just logs off and never comes back? This is not as simple as it might look at first.

In my opinion it never has to return to the stone. So if they were twelve swords in stones. For the whole existence of the game they will only be twelve swords in the game world. Hence the uniqueness quality. In a case like that you really don't even have to balance it. If only one person can ever get the sword then even if it makes him a demi-god it doesn't matter becuase enough people should be challenging him to wear him down and eventually kill him. (Well, I should mention that I'm thinking of a world where even a level 1 blacksmith has a chance, however small, of killing a level 100 Mega-Warrior. Something similar to the warcraft hero technique of leveling up where the emphasis of a new level is the potential new skills rather than the increase of personal attributes).

The logging off is also a major issue. Or rather a subset of a greater issue of items getting lost. E.g. someone tossing it into a bush and abandoning it, as differentiated from someone hiding it behind a bush to return for it later.
The best solution I can think of will be something similar to the Crysknives in the Dune books. A Crysknife that is apart from a living person too long will whither away. So you could have items that are not properly stored or being carried around wither away and THEN if that happens you could reset the quest.
What I'm hoping though is that this will hardly ever happen. And combined with the existence of proffesional thieves this could mean say that someone who gets and puts it in a bank for instance and abandons it there could have it stolen from the bank. Of course, this can only really apply to really precious and rare items though. Where enough people have heard about it and want it badly enough to go to extreme lengths to get it. Even if you do have numerous trivial auto resetting quests in a game and you throw just one or two of the type I've been trying to describe, I believe that will quickly prove a focus especially for the high level players who feel they've done evrything already. It will give them something to chase after, and since they are competing against other high level players for it the challenge will be always changing in a very natural way.

Quote:
In the real world, not everybody can be a hero. In these games, most people do want to be a hero. The usual way of faking this is by giving them trivial tasks with grand names. Would you rather they have trivial tasks with trivial names? Or would you somehow create grand tasks with grand names that would be suitable for all the players? If so, how?

At this point I should mention that I'm going more and more into the world of my imaginary 'ideal' MMORPG. So, if stuff I mention is unclear or unrealistic (or is already being done everywhere) I would appreciate if you could point them out.

For the division of tasks, I lean towards the idea of having levels of tasks with level of effects. For instance, you could have trade caravans which regularly travel a particular route and require protection, the sense of achievement is in defeating any bandits you meet and the van arriving safely.
You could have hunting tasks that require capturing animals(or strange creatures) that are troubling villages or farms etc. The sense of achievement should be from the village actually becoming safer after you succeed. And there should be enough villages around that the same one doesn't need to encounter the same problem every couple of weeks.
In fact you could use a variation of the dragon theme. E.g have a pack of roaming werewolves in the mountains with one or two regularly coming into nearby forests and attacking vilagers. Whenever they come down it triggers the mini quest for someone to kill them, after a few mini quests a major quest is delivered with the goal of going into the mountains and destroying the whole pack. However, even after the pack is dead the curse remains. So in another village somewhere far away another victim may fall under the curse and a new pack will begin in another mountain range over there.

On the upper end of the quest level you could have world chaging quests that actually chage the world. For instance, every ten years or so (game time) the world may begin to experience a drought which will not end untyil a weewolf is sacrificed to Gaia on at the foot of mount Olympus. This quest can only be done once evry ten years, and whoever does it should be awarded cult status by the all NPCs in the world (especially farmer's and thier daughters :P)

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Quote:If there's a village around, the dragon will start to feed on thier flock and maybe even people etc. this becomes a quest

How? Define that transition. There's the key.

I think I should explain that in my mind a quest is simply when someone has a need and is willing to offer a player a reward for completing it. In the case of the dragon this would probably be the village mayor going to the village news agent and placing an advert for a dragon hunter. depending on the difficulty or price of the quest (or simply the amount of time the quest goes un accomplished the info could be spread to surrounding villages and towns.) This system will even allow player initiated quests, for instance a great healer may want to make somepowerful potion with and needs dragon heart so he goes to his nearest news agent and offers a reward for however can deliver him the body of a dragon. Voila, a quest.

Or for instance, someone has purchased the sword in stone for a huge amunt of money and it is being transported to him by caravan. The buyer or seller could offer a quest for people to guard the caravan. And hopefully, as the news gets out, some other players will decide they want to steal it from the caravan. Hence a bit, or a lot, of PvP action.

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Quote:This would then give the older player pride of place. They could talk about things like "In the old days no sane man would ever walk alone into the valleys of dragons, I remember once actually coming across a mother and her three pups. There's nothing as scary as an angry woman who breathes fire I tell ya".

It would also give the newer player a sense of "this game sux0rs, all the k3wl monsters are dead and it's too easy". Who'd subscribe to that game?

You'd need some sort of self-balancing pendulum system here, and that also is not easy.

Very good point. First, hopefully, there should only be one or two cases or near extinct creatures. So that now when those creatures do apear, it's a very very big deal (This also means the have to be extremely dangerous as well.)

But in truth, my hope is that the best action will be provided by PvP. So the loss of one or two monsters won't be that big a problem becuase the best challenge (other players) is still out there in abundance.

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Quote:Instead of focusing on making each quest a whole story on it's own, you could give the players more low level elements to build thier own stories. As far as I understand that is actually what role playing is about.

Don't get too attached to the role playing term unless you're gonna start vetting players on the door. Most of them won't want to 'roleplay' in your sense of the word.

Quote:That's what we want. We don't want people who just want to be annoying at no cost to themselves. However, we have absolutely no problem with career criminals who know the risks and who take great care to make sure they are not seen or to leave no witnesses.

Who's 'we'? Certainly not the newbies who thought they were going to be joining some of large-scale adventuring party and instead find themselves prey to master thieves.

The system doesn't solve crime, it just removes those who are poor at it. Skilled players will still be able to wreak havoc on others should they so choose.

Forgive me. When I say 'we' I refer to my imaginary development team working on my imaginary game. :P

Anyway, I genuinely believe roleplaying has a place for griefers. They will be the equivalent of criminals, phsycopaths and genocidal maniacs in the real world. The system I suggested isn't designed to solve crime, but to make it challenging and exciting as part of the game. Combined with the bounty hunter quest system, and institutions like banks etc which provide storage and protection services, I think this can work. Let's say for instance your level cap is something like 20. And you have a maxed out criminal trying to steal some treasure from the bank. The bank however, will having a standing quest for top level stealth and muscle players to protect it. And should the criminal actually escape, the bank will generate a quest for his head and the missing items. Infact, the bank could actually have NPC guards whose sole purpose it to see the criminal and then escape alive so they can give a report of his description for the recovery quest. Plus, with all this in place the bank could actually offer insurance for the value of anything stolen from it's vaults.

Having all this in place means a crminal will not just wake up in the morning and decide to stage a bank robbery. He will have to plan, probably get some co-conspirators and even after the theft he has lay low for a while until the heat cools off. (But he stil has to be careful with the items cuz of the crysknife clause). In my opinion this increases the value of the game it doesn't reduce it.

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Quote:And the target must suffer real loses every time they die, not just the possible looting of all items he's carrying. One idea I've been tossing around is that they lose all experience since thier last level up.

That's a pretty low cost compared to some games.

Well, I may be wrong but I believe if it takes an average of 3 weeks to go up a level and you know that if you get killed at any point you lose all the experience you've gained in that three weeks, I think it'll encourage people to think twice before throwing thier lives away(I personally prefer to have fewer levels which take a while to achieve.).

Which is why the safe zones will have to do things to actively prevent known murderers from entering them. Again, the goal is not to totally prevent random killing just to encourage more care and planning. If for instance a player gets arrested every two weeks (and in other to be arrested, or as part of his sentencing, he first has to be killed) then he will never be able to level up, which means he will never be too much of a threat.


I should also mention as an aside that I think players should have other things to do in MMOs than survive, kill and chat. An idea that cross my mind is to have players be able to design and build their own houses a la Sims. As a way to display thier wealth, or show thier artistic skills. Animal Crossing and The Sims come to mind as examples of fun time consuming tasks that plaqyers might enjoy doing when their are not out killing or getting killed. The proper implementation of this though brings up a whole ton of issues which I've notyet been able to handle satisfactorily

Amen, part of the reason I keep away from MMOs is that most of them are generalistic messes. They try and capture everything and instead get nothing.

My dream MMO would be player driven, unforgiving, and fast. Every man for himself, with alliances and contracts formed as matters of self-serving conveniance. No levelling at all, only inventory, and that must be protected. Everything player driven, the goals of the game simply being various positions of high power, ultimately with one player being king.

Then I'd run a reality TV show based on the stories of the top-level players on G4TechTV. :P

@ Kylotan
In my opinion none of the algorithm for the ideas I've mentioned are in any way complicated.
The dragon rampage can be triggered by a formula based on time since last rampage, current dragon population, distance to suitable rampage habitat and any more variables you want to control distribution of rampages (eg last time this village was rampaged, population of village etc.).
As for the mayor (or any leaders of small towns or huge metropolises {metropoli}), the death of an NPC (depending on the known circumstances of that death) can be automatically set to trigger him to initiate a quest. In safe zones even the death of PCs could trigger bounty hunter quests. However, even things like sickness, drought etc. should trigger thier own quests.
Ie you would have a set of disasters programmed into the game which, when the necesary variables are present, descend on various groups of PCs or NPCs. Thus creating a need. Whoever is in chrage of this group will then be automatically triggered to initiate a quest to solve that problem.


IMHO, the goal most people have in most games is to 'win'. In MMORPGs this is usually interpreted as getting to the highest level available in your chosen 'job' (or for some people in every job available) and getting as many items as possible as a visible sign of thier success. Even griefer's are just trying to win in thier own way either by taking a short cut to acquisition of goods and experience or by making thier presence felt by as many people as possible and in ther own way 'affecting' the game world.
Therefore, players that undertake quests are usually trying to do one or the other. Many players will even put up with extremely boring quests just to be able to show off a shiny new sword. So every quest that is designed has to provide the player with a way of getting either one or the other. In most of the scenarios I've painted the reward will simply be cash (and of course the possibility of a good fight) this the player can translate into whatever items or trophies he desires.
Some of them will provide the oportunity for battle and levelling up, but I really see this as a side effect to the quest itself. Simply standing around in the wild long enough should provide an oppurtunity for a fight but the real threats will come from a few high level creatures (in which case the quest may be to kill them) and other players (I know PvP again :P )

I also believe it would be really positive to have a ranking system. Players enjoy being able to compare thier performance against themelves and others. Preferably though they should be many ranking systems both in different categories and on different level. So a player may not be the best assasin in the whole game but at least he's the best assasin on the isle of sea and thunder. This will give most players the feeling that they can actually make a name for themselves, if not game wide then at least in thier own land.
In addition I also strongly support the trophy room concept. Players should have oppurtunity to show off their strentghs and achievements, rather than just walking around in thier high level armour. They should at least be given rooms perhaps or shrines, which they can decorate with medals trophies and rare items which they have acquired over the years and passers by can look and be amazed! Or even houses and/or mansions which they can buy and decorate as a symbol of thier wealth/status in the world. (Yeah I know houses may be a bit difficult to implement, but a guy can dream can't he?)