Hi!

I haven''t played neither of those games, and I''m in a hurry.
Just gonna tell you what popped up in my head when I read your question.

If you try to attack someone with less than x% "army value" (tanks are worth so and so, while troops are worth this and that) your army will start "calling you a chicken". They don''t want to attack, or they leave. Or something.
That section thing looked good too.

If this is a 3D game, newbies can start at a "hill". That big things like tanks can''t clime. To grow bigger, the newbie must "lower the hill" by terraforming (or such). That way the hill gets lower until it''s at the same level as the rest. Thus enabling bigger opponents to travel the land and attack.

that''s just a thought in a rush...

good luck!

}+TITANIUM+{

I really like the "chicken" idea..

If there was some penalty for unfair gameplay you wouldn''t have to restrict the players'' actions, they would have to be responsible for playing nice..

You can''t eliminate all the unsportsmanlike players from the game, and even if you had some set of restrictions protecting newbies there would still be assholes trying to ruin things for everyone else..

I definitely believe there should be more thought to this in games, it''s one of the main reasons I don''t get into alot of online gaming(that and I spend most of my time programming)..

You can''t possibly restrict all ways people could play unfairly, and honest players wouldn''t necessarily appreciate being restricted in any manner because a few others can''t be trusted..

I agree with Seriema, there should be some penalty for unfair gameplay..whatever penalties you choose to implement could also be made to fit in nicely with the theme of the game, so that it would be transparent to most honest players..

My 2 cents


"Like all good things, it starts with a monkey.."

Shadowdancer, I lean towards the Newbie Sectors idea. Have several sectors that get harder, say 3 of them, and a Newbie has to play them all to be allowed in the real game (galaxy, battlefield, etc.). Have a credit system, like the experience in RPGs that value the player''s ability and one have to have at least, say 1000 credits for accessing Sector 2, 3000 for Sector 3 and 10000 for the real game. Also, if one played through those once, he would be given chance to skip that part, the "tutorial" part. And you can have some good players to guide the newbies in the Small Sectors, before they are allowed to the Big ones. Those helpers will be like the Mods in a Forum or OPs in IRC. They could have a number of task (simple ones) they could give newbie players, so newbies would learn easyer with the human interaction. Speaking of Small Sectors, this could be a slang for the Newbies Sectors, like "What do you mean, you''re skilled, you just got out of the Smalls!"...

Just some braindump...


Boby Dimitrov
boby@azholding.com