I am trying to propose for a new game type. In this design, the server side is basically for grouping and perhaps grouping only, everything else will be on the client side. Basically the philosophy is that, the server will define storylines and set up check points on the storylines and to keep track of only resources and critical items. It doesn't care about what the player will do on the client side. 1. Storyline You start as a nobody in a village (client side), you follow the classic RPG game storyline as in the game Ultima VII. Everything is just like an old fashioned single machine RPG game. It could be a skill-based game on the client side. As your toon grows, you feel the need of gears such as armors and weapons for further adventuring. The client side will not fulfill your gear needs. Now you need to group with people on the server side to get gears as well as other resources. The trick is, you adventure life and storyline are on the client side, while critical resources are located on the server side. The play style is basically like this, you play on the client side for adventuring (RPG). At the same time, you connect yourself to the server to specify your class/profession, what kind of resource you would like to farm, that is, what kind of player party you would like to join. Alternatively, you can be a party leader to pick your crews, instead of the being picked. That is, you either put your name to the list of 'looking for group', or you may start a new party and looking for crews actively. 2. Classes/Professions There will be basically 8~10 core classes, to form groups of 1~8 members. The combat system is basically turn-based, for more critical raiding/farming, you need a highly co-operative team to do the job. The server side adapts a level-based system. You need to group to grow in levels. And level may only indicate the kind of resources you need corresponding to the storyline on your client side game. On the client side, you continue your adventure into the deeper realm. You start to expand your village into a town, a city and a capitol. You start to build armies and your own kingdom. One day you will be informed that another human kingdom becomes your competitor and your target is destroy that competitor. Then there comes yet another human kingdom competitor. Then there comes an elf kingdom, or a dwarf kingdom, or an orc kingdom. So you go alone the storyline to continue to maintain your own kingdom and to face the popped-up kingdom competitors. 3. Client/server role It is different from a single machine RPGs in that, the storyline is controlled and checked by the server. Actually, the server decides (randomly) what will be the next kingdom to pop up as your competitor. The server counts your resources and decides what your fate will be. Everything else will be on your client side. Again, in order to compete with and to beat down your competitor kingdom, you need to complete RPG quests on the client side (the server is freed), yet in order to complete the mission and quests, you may need special types of resources. You need to form parties of the same level (looking for same resources types) to farm the resources on the server side. An Example Here's an in-game scenario, as an example. On the server side, I took the class of a human paladin tank. On the client side, I follow the storyline till I need to build a much tougher city wall for my kingdom. The critical resources for building such a city wall are a secret ancient architect design. In order to get to the design, first, you need to change my toon on the client side to a scribe with certain special skill gains, say, I need to gain an extra +20 inscription, +20 stone-crafting, +20 magery..... The server doesn't care about your current status, it only keeps track of whether "+20 inscription, +20 stone-crafting, and +20 magery" is achieved or not (without cheating). The server will only keep track of and to make sure of those changes are progressed. For example, my toon’s current inscription is 100 (maxed), stone-crafting is 0, and magery is 90. So I need to train my inscription to 120, stone-crafting to 20 and magery to 110. After this mission and quests are completed, my 120 inscription and 110 magery will gradually return to 100. So I start to kill client side creatures, the server does not care about what monsters to killed, you need to find a suitable monster of your level, such that the combat will last long enough to trigger a gain. And the server controls such that you won't gain too fast and, not too slow either. There will be storylines which lead you to kill necessary bosses such that you may finally acquire the necessary skills. If you want to cheat on the client side, it is ok, yet you will be so bored to wait for the gains controlled by the server side. After the questing by following the in-game storylines on the client side, I finally achieved the necessary skill requirements. The server thus qualifies me to enter a dangerous zone on the server side to continue the mission, which will be in the party mode. So I put my name to the list of "looking for group", and under the category of “level 30~40, dungeon Wrong”. So while you continue to manage, quest, kill monsters on the client side, you wait for a team to be formed, and only to dungeon Wrong. Other players of the same level with their own different needs may need also to go to dungeon Wrong. Finally, you gather together forming a party heading to the dungeon Wrong. In the dungeon, we fight different monsters. I need to fight a specific boss to get the architect design. Other players need to fight other bosses for other quest items or resources. So finally, we finished our quests, killing the bosses for each other. And luckily, I get the architect design I need for building the new type city wall. The game balance is that you need to level on the server side naturally (by server design). If a player goes too slow, he may not meet the level 30~40 requirement to go to Wrong in the above case. On the other hand, if the player goes too fast than the controlled storyline, he exceeds the level 30~40 group requirement. He thus has to pay dearly (in form of time, effort and gold) for the resources/quest items. PvP 1-on-1 PvP works similarly. You put your name and thus class and level to a list, while you venture through the client side storylines. Say, you are building the city walls of your kingdom in-game (on the client side), while you nominate yourself to the list available for 1-on-1 PvP. So someone would like to PvP with you, he will thus send you a message after seeing you on the list. Group vs. group PvP works the same. First you need to form a PvP group on the server side, and then you look for another group to do the Group vs. group PvP. As for guild vs. guild war, you need to join a player guild first, and to gather special resources and to build special units and facilities. Your guild may war with another player guild in siege. Other forms of player wars can be carried out similarly, such as racial wars or server side kingdom wars. Wars can be at all levels, and wars will sink resources. Even the wars on the client side will consume resources. A player needs to farm local resources on the client side (critical resources will be checked by server, in the form of quests), he needs also to farm resources on the server side via grouping. Grouping will become natural, as everyone demands resources at the same level. And you don't need to know anyone to group. You just nominate yourself to be available and you will be picked up by the party leaders. Leveling will be natural too, as there is no motive for getting as high as possible. In contrary, you need to stay to the right level for the right resources controlled by the storylines. So it cycles like this, you quest on client side, feel the demand for resources and items, then group hunt on the server side, gather the server side resources and items, then build a kingdom out, then war with other kingdoms via both pvm and pvp, thus consume and sink resource, then farm resources of various types, build and enhance your own kingdom, war again and again to sink resources.

So the idea is that most of the time, you are playing a semi-traditional single player RPG game, but on occassion you connect to a server to play through dungeons or battles or the like with other people? And you're forced to play online to get certain widgets you need to proceed in the single player game?

I think this kind of design makes a lot of sense - you let the individual player be the kind of world-changing hero that most MMORPGs simply can't support, while still giving the player the chance to interact with other human players. This is the kind of game design I have in mind when people talk about 'massively single player' games - there are a lot of people playing, but other players intrude into your personal world only indirectly.

There are some concerns to consider - cheating in the single player game will be pretty trivial as the logic is all interpreted client-side. You'd need to manage the potential for cheats in the single player game to impact the multiplayer game. Also, you may be attracting a niche audience, as to really enjoy your game, the player needs to be interested in both long-term, potentially slow moving epic campaigns and short-term, rapid action multiplayer action.

One thing that's kind of handy is that you can show each player his own interpretation of events. For example, if you have three players with dwarf characters, two elves, and an orc, and they all band together for a castle raid, you could display all the players in a skin depending on what each local player would expect based on the situation in that player's single-player game. Sort of like in America's Army how each player always sees his team as the USians.

Quote:Original post by snak
So the idea is that most of the time, you are playing a semi-traditional single player RPG game, but on occassion you connect to a server to play through dungeons or battles or the like with other people? And you're forced to play online to get certain widgets you need to proceed in the single player game?

Basically it is so. Actually, the server has its own "world", it is a MMORPG + a traditional single player RPG game. However, the MMO part is somehow driven by the single player RPG part.

Quote:
I think this kind of design makes a lot of sense - you let the individual player be the kind of world-changing hero that most MMORPGs simply can't support, while still giving the player the chance to interact with other human players. This is the kind of game design I have in mind when people talk about 'massively single player' games - there are a lot of people playing, but other players intrude into your personal world only indirectly.

Yes, the issue of cheating should be handled carefully. The design concept is that if the player cheats, he will be bored as the speed of progress is somehow controlled by the server. Moreover, if the player cheats, he may lose important information to complete his mission to gain access to important resources and items, as the server will regularly plant NPCs and thus quests and clues into the single player RPG part. If the player cheats, he may miss out what are planted and thus may fail to access critical resources.

Quote:
There are some concerns to consider - cheating in the single player game will be pretty trivial as the logic is all interpreted client-side. You'd need to manage the potential for cheats in the single player game to impact the multiplayer game. Also, you may be attracting a niche audience, as to really enjoy your game, the player needs to be interested in both long-term, potentially slow moving epic campaigns and short-term, rapid action multiplayer action.

On the other hand, they are always allowed to cheat on gathering the less important local resources in the single player RPG world. However, those resources will become useless if the design is right. For example, the design may require the player to first acquire a server side tool to do the harvesting. And right after the harvesting, those local resource should be combined with the important server resources to form semi-products. Extra local resource will decay on each server check.

Though he may cheat on getting local resources, since it can only stored in a form combining with the server resources/items, it is thus meaningless to keep extra local resources.

More importantly, local resources are usually obtained by following the single player RPG storyline and quests, if the player cheats by by-passing the in-game storyline, he will be bored most of the time.

Of course, no matter how cautious the designs are, players are always the most creative group of people, there's always a possibility that they may find out all they can cheat and ruin the game.

Quote:
One thing that's kind of handy is that you can show each player his own interpretation of events. For example, if you have three players with dwarf characters, two elves, and an orc, and they all band together for a castle raid, you could display all the players in a skin depending on what each local player would expect based on the situation in that player's single-player game. Sort of like in America's Army how each player always sees his team as the USians.

Yes. I think that group hunting will occur on the server side. There will be a whole game world in the server side for grouping (and grouping only). That is, you solo in the single player RPG world, while you group hunt in the MMO server. The RPG world may just be a copy or a fragment of the server side MMO world. Say, the story is that due to a catastrophe, all players are brought to the different time spots of the same (or a fragment of) game world, so that each player will have his own copy of the world for his single player RPG part of the game.


The overall concept here is,
A (or several) main storyline is designed and implemented just as in a traditional sinple player RPG game, such as Ultima VII. The server will not care about how the player will play the game (as if it is a single player game). However, the server will gain control of the speed of progress of the game. The server will give out quests and clues by regularly planting quests and NPCs to the client side RPG. As a result, the players are forced to follow the designed storyline to get to the NPCs and to finish the design quests in order to gain access to critical resources and items.

Besides the storyline, the player has the ultimal goal of building, expanding and maintaining an empire. He thus needs to go along the storyline to get to the different quests in order to gain access to resources and items needed for the empire-building. He thus needs to group and farm the resources on the server side game world. He can't, however, over farm on the server side because the client story controls the progress for the player actually knows what to farm. The player thus has to go back and forth between the server game world and the client game world.

And the whole farming of resources and items serves but one purpose - to war with others in form of pvm or pvp. Resources are thus sunken or consumed war after war. To simply put, by going through the designed storyline in a single player RPG game, the player discovers what resources and items are needed for in various points of the game, he then farm those resources in both the local game world (soloing) and server game world (grouping). Then he uses those resources/items to build his own kingdom then to war with NPC empires or player empires to consume out the farmed resources. Then rinse and repeat.

[Edited by - Hawkins8 on October 13, 2008 9:33:04 PM]

Quote:Original post by JensB
2 questions that come to mind:

a) would turn based combat be feasible in large scale raiding scenarios? Wouldn't that be very slow?

b) a game design like this sounds to me like it would be vulnerable to client side manipulation?

In a turn-based combat system, large scale raiding will be represented as the fighting amongst squads. You team up 1~8 players then to fight with an enemy group.

Strategically it may go like this, you spread tactical small group made of 1-3 players to first engage the full team strong group of enemies, such that your own strong teams can pick the weaker teams to kill. The tactical groups will also consume an enemy team's mana pool, such that the strong enemy team will be weakened for your strong team to kill.

On the other hand, you need to form boss raiding teams to kill the NPC bosses. At the same time you form player killer teams to kill enemy's boss raiding teams. To simply put, you need tactics in a large scale war instead of purely zerging.

In a siege:
- main purpose is to form extra strong teams to raid the bosses. But enemy's killer teams will try to kill the boss-raiding teams.

- you have to form your own killer team to kill enemy's boss-raiding teams, but enemy's small tactical team will attack you to consume your power and to hold you to steal time for the boss-raiding teams to kill the bosses.

- other teams will have to clear up the area such that the boss-raiding teams can approach the inner bosses.

From my own experience in a turn-based game, PvP is usually faster and takes less than 20 minutes to finish. Boss-raiding is like this, it usually takes around less than 10 minutes for a team to fail, because if the team can stand the first 10 minutes most likely it is stablized and thus bear a high chance to kill the boss. For a success, it takes 45~80 minutes to finally finish off a nasty boss. It's a load of fun because you need to be highly co-operative in order to kill a boss.


Since client manipulation is actually inevitable, the tactics is, if you cheat you will be bored.

[Edited by - Hawkins8 on October 15, 2008 2:28:13 AM]

This sounds a lot like a "me too" version of other popular MMOs. I wonder if this is why the genre is boring people, because here we have yet another person that wants to make yet another MMO about orcs and elves and dwarfs, with raiding, looting, PvP, etc.

Clearly this is the work of someone who was not born as a genius game designer. I'm sorry. Recently someone explained to me that if you're not born with game design genius, you will never have it. So, uou will never be a good designer because you were clearly born without the intrinsic genius. This concept is dribble.

You want to create a server protocol that will never, ever, ever work, and has no real purpose or value.

The servers and clients handle everything together with the exception of things your post never even mentions (like rendering, animation data, etc.). You can't limit what the server handles arbitrarily, nor is there anything special about saying that your server will act as a state machine... all servers do. For two people to play a game together, each person needs to know what the other person is doing all the time. If you attack an enemy, that data has to be sent to the server, and then sent to the other player, or else your friend has no idea what's happening. If you're a thousand miles away from me and you kill something and leave it dead on the ground, that data gets sent to the server and then to me, so I know what exists a thousand miles away. Now extrapolate. The amount of data that needs to be sent/received just to synchronize any kind of complex game between two or more players is massive, difficult, and always THE bottleneck.

I'm probably explaining things you don't understand.

Anyway, your idea is bad. Sorry.

Quote:Original post by Delphinus
I'll finish with three questions:

1) Would you play your MMO of choice if it was single-player?

2) Would you really be able to slay the same dragon over and over again - do MMOs have a viable goal when killing a dragon means nothing?

3)How should we design an MMO? Around gameplay, or around making money?

Your three questions are quite legitimate. I suppose that you already realized that my design is an attempt to break that.

Quote:
without any attempt to try and make the actual Game Design better

I said the same. Yet those proclaimed indies seem to be offended whenever game design is challenged. Sh...Hehe..

[Edited by - Hawkins8 on October 20, 2008 9:50:44 PM]

Quote:Original post by QuantifyFun
This sounds a lot like a "me too" version of other popular MMOs. I wonder if this is why the genre is boring people, because here we have yet another person that wants to make yet another MMO about orcs and elves and dwarfs, with raiding, looting, PvP, etc.

Rather it's all about keyboard pressing and mouse clicking, if you deny that when the design is right, keyboard pressing and mouse clicking could mean alot of fun. Same is said about all you listed here.

Quote:
Clearly this is the work of someone who was not born as a genius game designer. I'm sorry. Recently someone explained to me that if you're not born with game design genius, you will never have it. So, uou will never be a good designer because you were clearly born without the intrinsic genius. This concept is dribble.

Your resorting it to personal attack is not a surprise. Your kind can never appreciete new ideas. BTW, you are wrong again to assume that my throwing out of the idea is for the hidden message that 'I'm a genius designer'. I know exactly who I am, unlike you.

Quote:
You want to create a server protocol that will never, ever, ever work, and has no real purpose or value.

Hmm...that's an 'of course' for someone as lame as you are. A genius usually is the one whose works are considered by someone stubborn as 'it's never never never...'. hehe... get a clue.

Quote:
The servers and clients handle everything together with the exception of things your post never even mentions (like rendering, animation data, etc.). You can't limit what the server handles arbitrarily, nor is there anything special about saying that your server will act as a state machine... all servers do. For two people to play a game together, each person needs to know what the other person is doing all the time. If you attack an enemy, that data has to be sent to the server, and then sent to the other player, or else your friend has no idea what's happening. If you're a thousand miles away from me and you kill something and leave it dead on the ground, that data gets sent to the server and then to me, so I know what exists a thousand miles away. Now extrapolate. The amount of data that needs to be sent/received just to synchronize any kind of complex game between two or more players is massive, difficult, and always THE bottleneck.

You sound if single player RPG never exists in human history. Try to make a single player RPG first, before I show you how a server can gain control of such a single player RPG to form a new genre.

Ok, let's go into some technical details. What you advocate here is that the current method of handling details in the current MMOs cannot be changed. My advocate here is that the currect mehtod of server control can be changed.

The current server design in MMOs is that every single step a player made, every single action a player take are handled and memorized by the server side. My advocate however is that, in party mode the server does the same job as in the current MMOs. However and for a purpose, the server needs not always keep track of a player's actions during his soloing, he doesn't need to counteract with the MMO 'world' during his soloing. To be more specific, he can be left alone just as in a single player RPG, till to the point that server attention should be drawn.

Either you are such a lame designer or you know nothing about MMO game design at all to say that players can't be separated from the server side. Now try to answer again this question with your lameness,

Is it possible for the server to stop keep tracking of a single player's actions or not, technically speaking when it is needed by the game design?

You are such a joke in denying that it is totally implementable technically. It is a waste of my time to go into technical details with someone as lame as you are.

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I'm probably explaining things you don't understand.

I can teach you a lesson or two on MMO design, once you know how to design an RPG. Sorry to tell you that, your denial of the existence of 3D single player RPG game design or advocate that how impossible it is made is quite laughable.

Quote:
Anyway, your idea is bad. Sorry.

Comments from someone lame and with emotional anger like you usually lead me to believe the opposite. Another mediocre indie offended by the fact stated in another thread. Live with all your shame and anger for the fact that you are incapable of making good MMORPGs.

[Edited by - Hawkins8 on October 20, 2008 11:58:53 PM]

I dont disagree that the topic creators idea still has some flaws but..

"If you're a thousand miles away from me and you kill something and leave it dead on the ground, that data gets sent to the server and then to me, so I know what exists a thousand miles away."

Thats untrue, You dont need to know it exists a thousand miles away, the server has to know about it, and maybe when your just about to see it on the client the server would tell you about it.

You really only need the data on what you can see, if you give the player data that they can't see, it causes cheats, like the see thru wall cheats that was popular in fps

If you say knew where every creature was in an mmo, you would have addons very quickly that would tell a player exactly where to go when say hunting for quests.



The only thing you can trust coming from a client, is that it will lie. everything else should either be handled server side, or have no bearing on any form of multiplayer combat/progression.

Id like to see a P2P server for a mmo.. I think it could actually fit in with the idea you mentioned, You would still use a central command center, but it would only have to concern itself with high level tasks, and leave the rest to the peer group to manage.

Thought for topic poster, Maybe mmo isn't the right area for you if that last post is how you respond to negative feedback.

When things go wrong and players get excited, they are anything but polite and respectable, and any mmo that has staff replying with the word 'lame' that much wont last very long.

Just something to keep in mind ^.^