Quote:Now, about unique loot. I think that this has been proven to work in games like Diablo, Diablo 2...

Well, remember it's not really unique. It's unique to a single player, but everyone can get everything. It gives the appearance of being unique, which is probably all that matters. :) More importantly, the DiabloII community has made a game out of making character 'builds' out of unique armor and armor sets and then playing to collect the gear and achieve the build.

In a game with really unique items this can't be done. Something to think about anyway.

Limit the players strength, if they went against 100 easy guys, they would die just as quickly as going up against one of the hardest, without a sound plan in mind

that means even a army of goblins would be scary enough raiding your town, even if you was 10 times as strong

A level system simply wouldn't work for limited monsters, cause as was said, a high level would go into a low level area and kill everything

you would prob also need to run ingame time for monsters about 4 times the rate of players, so even if there where wiped out a ingame a couple of days later, real time that night, the monsters would be starting to creep back in

There is a lot here that I agree with. What about guild made quest? For example, a guild member could create a "quest" for an item which another member (or stranger) could carry out and thus gain payment and XP (assuming the game uses XP). If guild had there faction standing, a stranger could complete a guild mission and gain points toward that guild faction. Moreover, guilds (the guild master for example) could creat missions to destroy so many players from an enemy guild or contribute so much of x into the guild's stock room in exchange for XP or faction standing. These are just some quick ideas I came up with. To me it seems like a good way (not the only way) to allow players to create "content" using predesigned templates. It would also give players the ability to see the results of their actions and allow their actions to gain meaning. Just an idea I had. Perhaps I will make a longer response later but I just thought I'd through this out there.

On the topic of uniqueness, I don't think things need be entirely unique and trying to make them that way would likely be a waste of time. All you really need to do is give the illusion of everything being unique, so say, there need to be enough swords that the chance of you finding the one you have in a general store or for sale is miniscule, not zero. What's it matter if an item is truly unique if you can make them NOT truly unique and no one (save .01%) ever finds another one like it?

I've thought about this an I've I have a system I believe works for an mmo game, but it's based heavily on PVP rather than PVE. (I have work in a bit, so I'll keep this short). I just have to point out the thing about quests. Having a quest that can only be completed once sounds great. But take into consideration that in an MMO not everyone solos. Do you share that quest with your teammates? Another point is epic quests that have more meaning than the kill 5 something or others. Like kill arteus the evil mining boss. You know if you kill him another quest would have to be created to keep it persistent with your idea.

However, is the place where the quest is important? I mean if there is a building the enemy is in like a mine lets say. I mean the next content you make would have to use the mine in another way. Would it just be random quests via a system of instancing to trick players into believing that new content is there? If everything was instanced this might be possible. However, most players like to do things again and again to level. There are players that will play so long that they will begin to see the pattern. Like go collect 6 something at some place rather than 5 something else at another place.

Building actual unique quests in the game that everyone can experience doesn't hurt immersion as much as you might think. Knowing that the world is tailored for a specific quest and not just random quests also has an advantage. Creating the "spider" forest where a farmer tells you to kill three spiders that are messing with his crops makes sense. (I think :P ). Give the NPC more quests sounds like a better idea honestly. Then players can move on from an NPC or region knowing they have completed something other than staying in one place.

Having unlimited quests gives the player of feeling no accomplishment I'd imagine. They'd talk to the NPC later and he'd have another quest probably similar to the one that was just completed. Unless you are going for a lot of replayability then this idea is not needed. There should ideally be enough content in each area per level range which can be sufficient by making the world larger with more to do at each level range. Playing the game again in another place would be a different experience ideally much more worthwhile then receiving random quests.