Quote:Original post by anemian
When you start that's as powerful as you'll ever be everything else is you trading off power for a different one.

This is interesting, the player could start off with lets say 10 power points.

As they progress, they keep learning new attacks etc... - but must always take away some of their original power points if they want to substitute them with their new skill.

Eg:

A new player has:

Agility - 4
Speed - 4
Strength - 2

Total 10, nothing special about the player; these basic stats identify them as a beginner.

A more experienced player has:

Agility - 1
Speed - 1
Strength - 2
Fancy new skill - 6

The total is still 10, but the variety denotes a slightly more experienced player.

The 10 power points is just an example, it would be much more interesting to have something like 1000 to play with. Also, the higher the amount - the less people would notice that they are the same level as everyone else because the diversity between the characters would hide it so well.

The same system could be easily applied to items and weapons, not just skills.

Nice thinking Anemian.

As a nice decorative addition, your characters appearance could vary depending on the status of his stats: Someone with lots of strength but little agility could look really buff and clumsy, someone with loads of agility and nothing else could look really skinny etc...

This way - it is necessary to progress through the game as an RPG in order to unlock the diverse new items and skills, and anyone who chooses to hack their stats will only spoil the game for themselves - and gain no real statistical advantage.

It also means that 'Newbs' (What a wretched label) would be able to fend for themselves, and get into the game quickly - and customisation of every aspect of your character becomes a big part of the game.

Quote:Original post by LockeCole
When the player joins a new server the server asks him to reference the last server he played on. Then the new server directly asks the old server for the character info from the player's last play session.

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That brings me to the second obvious negative: servers will have to store a lot of character data for a long time and worse, they must be ready to serve it to anyone at any time. It is still not as bad as having to serve data to everyone continuously. From the player's perspective, some lag is acceptable for this connection since it only affects him at connect time. Further, given that servers are small, it is unlikely that a lot of players would need session-ending data at the same time. Storage space could also be combated. Say the data is stored client side instead and servers just keep some kind of hash of the data state. Whenever data has to be verified, the client sends his information (this would have to be relayed through the new server) and the old server hashes it and compares to the stored value. I know it's possible to break hashes but it wouldn't be easy.

This is also a great idea, you summed it all up pretty well. I particularly like the idea of the server verifying the players account of his character.

It adds great integrity to the system, there's also something appealing about the idea of having 'trusted server lists', which would doubtlessly add yet again to the sense of community for those who played on them.

Quote:Original post by invicticide
So we can say a player has some "units of progress" -- levels, in this case -- by which to compare himself to other players. More units of progress is considered "better". In an MMORPG, the units of progress are levels, and importantly, they are awarded by the game.

What if the units of progress were instead awarded by the community?

Yeah, this could tie in quite nicely with what LockeCole had in mind. On one hand you could have stats which always ammounted to pretty much the same thing - on the other hand you have your buddy points, perhaps unique to each server?

All it would need to do would be log your IP and associate it with a figure.

So it would read something like;

Turd Burger - (Number) - 678 buddy points
invicticide - (Number) - 800 buddy points
LockeCole - (Number) - 567 buddy points

(Those numbers a purely random by the way!)

Then again - your reputation is either in the hands of the server owners (who may occasionally be untrustworthy and press DELETE), or in your own, which again means hackers can diddle their own stats and wrongly come across as upstanding members of the community.

Maybe pair it with LockeCole's strategy, so that the server cross references your numbers?

Keep these ideas coming folks - they're really contributing to this system.

Also; be ruthless - any problems you can find, mention them - it will only spurr on more discussion, and may eventually prove the thread to be a nice game theory resource.

Might want to check out .hack//Fragment (which was never released here in the states). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.hack//fragment

It gave the users ability to host their own or upload their own dungeons. Then gave them more stuff to customize their dungeons with based on popularity.

Quote:Original post by thk123
Slightly off topic, but reading the OP made me think of this. Building on the rooms idea, what if everyone (with the technical know-how) could create their own rooms, rules and items. There would be a core set of rules that EVERYTHING would have to abide by, but other than that freedom would be granted to the players. They could create their own items and make "challenge" rooms to get them. If the system was robust enough and the community dedicated enough you could get rare items developing as the person who made it only made say 5 and then left...

Entire user made quests could emerge as people went from server to server, following clues that would be woven in to the history of the room.

Another benefit of it being text based is that anyone could get involved, no artistic skill required.

Give me a day and I will have this idea more fleshed out - but user generated content can certainly save money.

Thanks for the extra replies

This was actually part of the original idea anyway, the plan was to have the hosts able to change room themes too - so they became more like different time dimensions in a sense. One could be fantasy, another futuristic, a third steampunk.

Things would improve even more as players from one theme world visited a different one.

The possibilites are endless, imagine it to be like a 'Where's Wally' book, where the characters from one page would feature in another (Like a Martian wandering around ancient Egypt).

I never intended it for a text-based game, but since you mentioned it - it would make item creation much easier.

This idea is simply a system for games to use as a means of improving online play - I originally planned it for application to a 2D RPG style interface, but when you think about it; any format could apply from text-based to FPS.

Also, I'll check out that game you mentioned WierdoFu

It may even be possible to have it setup in such a way where you have one room as text-based, another as 2D and yet another as 3D....
Then each created item need 3 things, a text-description, a 2D sprite and a 3D model, but it would be possible.

I am definitely liking the idea though. If you are going to go through with it, give me a shout and I'll be happy to help make it work.

Oh, and on another note....
We might even make this into a GameDev community project.... Haven't seen one of those in a while. All it needs is a few decent coders to make it work. I'd be more then happy to help out with the whole organisation of the development process.

I agree with both of you actually.

Whilst the potential chink in the armour is relying heavily on the user made content, it is easily remedied.

I would do this by:

1) Supplying the game with LOTS of consistent, inspiring pre-made maps and environments.

2) (For this example I will humour my 2D RPG take on things, but the analogy can still be applied elsewhere) Supplying the users with an extensive BUT consistent tileset with which to construct their own maps.

This way - the users will have to try pretty hard to build stlyistically irrelevant content.