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[KittyTac]

This is an idea I had a while ago, basically players would start in a world with only basic controls shown to them, with about 10 more players in their group. Then the group's could unite, possibly with thousands of players. The world would be basically your normal fantasy world, but the countries will be composed of players, etc. Crafted items would be customizable, so players could create regalia for their leaders and all. So would weapons, there would be customizable siege engines and melee weapons, and it won't be just cosmetic, actually affecting protection and damage and damage type. The admins would create events to spice things up, send players on quests, etc. When you log off, the character would go to sleep and wake up when you log in. If you abandon it for a week, the character would die.

I have more ideas, that was just an outline, but feel free to discuss game design with me.

[Cathar]

Good idea on principle but horrible in practice imho. Giving the players full control in a world where the number of players is virtually unlimited is a recipy for disaster. Sure it would be great to have a little virtual house in a village and go hunt deers with your friends before working on your blacksmith skill, but in practice, that means gangs of players will come and aggro peasants randomly, spawn buildings to claim an area, raid-raze constructions of outsiders, etc. All experiments on that idea, be it with RR (possibly the game where this appears the most clearly, basically the village elects its mayor every now and then, and if you feel IRL politics are bottom feeding, wait to see what everyday people are capable of), or Ark, or Rust, or everything with a persistant world, falls into that.

And the worst is - there is no parade. It is a feature of the very idea of having a persistant player made world. You'll be dealing with masses of people, and when you do so always assume the worst of them, because that's what a non negligeable portion of them will do

[KittyTac]

I'll try it with about 100 randomly picked players as a demo sometime later, why not test it and see if it flies. And as admins are kinda supposed to take an active part, why not set people that misbehave on fire until the dust settles? And it'll have pixel-art graphics, enough to deter the annoying 10-year-olds.

[Cathar]

Well there's the fundamental problem with that idea : be it with admins or other means of punishing/controlling/limiting bad behaviors, you will limit the freedom of the player and it is the idea behind the game.
I feel like every game developper that came with this idea eventually crashed against that wall at high speed.

In real life, what stops people for misbehaving is the fact there is a intrinsic "social cost" in breaking the rules, or act like an ass in general. Why don't any medieval peasant would randomly wake up and slap the elder in the face, since there is no intrinsic punishment for doing so - it's because doing so comes with a very real social cost.

But if we're on the internet and it's a game, so the very concept of social cost is moot. You're anonymous, you don't really belong to the same society as the people you share the space with, after one hour of game you will disconect so everything goes. Add to that the game is meant to be huge and shared among a lot of people, and you know in advance it will be chaotic and unpleasant.

Just as an exemple, Wakfu tried this some years ago. Basically one could plant trees everywhere depending on their forester skill. Some players would make walls out of high level trees to forbid some areas to new players (who cannot cut them yet) and prevent them from accessing places where they could fight monsters of their level. Now trees can only get planted at some specific places, so the devs gave up on their idea of having terrain shaped by players.

[KittyTac]

What about making it so that building a real country takes time and if people grief for no reason there is a real incentive to punish them for other players?

[Enemy post]

You might want to look at Star Wars Galaxies to see how a very player-shaped world can function. It heavily focused on the economy, player housing, and carefully controlled PVP.

[KittyTac]

You might want to look at Star Wars Galaxies to see how a very player-shaped world can function. It heavily focused on the economy, player housing, and carefully controlled PVP.

These three things are what I want, in fact. There would be battles and all, but no random killing of other players, hopefully.

[Cathar]

Some ideas you might consider :

• Have cities made into small instances rather than open world. Dead maze does that. Dont allow player to build directly in the open world or you will run into very obvious problems, instead, give people the ability to access their shack when they enter the city they built it in
• Have the political system function with rules and don't make it impact too negatively the game of the losing side. For exemple, battles occur on week ends. The winning side gets a small bonus from owning a city, like 5% taxes or such
• Make extra sure there is no way for a player or group of player to "block" anyone. This is the most frustrating thing ever in a game - players losing their progress, being stopped from progressing (like being sent to jail for a set amount of RL time) or being unable to work on their projects

Frankly if you can manage this, I think this has potential. Imho these are the most annoying parts of persistant worlds with conflict

[KittyTac]

I might run a demo with just a hundred players some time later and see what goes wrong, then iron problems out.

[Cathar]

So it's about the hype, not the discussion, gotcha, good luck

[KittyTac]

Don't get me wrong, ideas are OK, but not the rather technical ideas you mentioned, I'm talking about gameplay mechanics.

[KittyTac]

Another idea: magic spells are created by combining a "method" (how to cast that spell, do you need empowering rituals, perhaps some condition?), a "type" (how does the spell affect things, is it a projectile? Line of sight? Something else entirely?), and an "essence" (with what does the spell affect things, there will be many elements).

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Listen broski, first of all you're idea is gonna fail on this principle alone: You're just HOPING players are going to act the way you want. They will not police themselves. They will not follow any non-binding rules. They will actively search to break the system. If your solution is to have an admin kill players who don't act the way you want, then why do you allow them to act that way in the first place??? Besides, isn't that a little hypocritical? "I want to be able to do ANYTHING in this MMO, but in this world without restrictions, players who do not follow MY vision for how the game should be played will be punished!" It's kind of ridiculous.

Secondly, your idea borders on being a life simulator. It's just too ambitious technically with a payout that isn't going to be satisfying to play. AND, imo, you didn't address the one part of MMOs that need the most work: the base fucking mechanics. You're just introducing more bureaucracy and infrastructure into a game system that is unironically boring to play. Action bars. Button pressing. Your goals don't really line up with how the average MMO is built. You might fare better implementing these thoughts into an economy simulation game or strategy game. You know what's incredibly not fun in real life? Running a country. That shit sucks.

Finally, take a cue from your predecessors, specifically Minecraft and Ultima Online. There's no real incentives to DO anything other than kill, loot, and burn as much as possible. In Ultima's post mortem the developers actually talk a lot about how the players basically became this plague to the idea of the game, and in hindsight it was to be expected. It's especially telling in Minecraft, where killing, looting, and burning is really like the smallest part of the game in theory, and yet griefing and fighting are widespread. Without structure, players don't really know HOW to act--in a sense, it's like a story with no villain or plot. These inherently flawed protagonists are just going to start creating problems because they have these otherwise unfulfillable character spines. So ya. Good luck, but don't expect much from basically every gamer's dream idea, that has also been tried and failed a billion times. At least not without a whole lot of refinement. A whole lot.

[KittyTac]

It will be mostly an experiment, yeah, maybe I will implement countermeasures to make it that just killing things alone will result in a rather boring failure. Acceptable breaks from reality also galore.

Oh, and numbers would matter a lot.

This scenario, for example.

A griefer decided to get a sword and murder some merchants armed only with daggers. A merchant disarms him, and as there is a mechanic to counter-attack after you have been disarmed, with a near-guaranteed stun. If the merchant was alone, he would pick up his sword and finish the job. But as there are multiple, someone runs up, picks up the sword, and kills the griefer with his own sword.

A bandit would be a valid "profession", though.

[peasant cretin]

A good read https://gameanalytics.com/blog/understanding-your-audience-bartle-player-taxonomy.html which is a take of the original Players Who Suit MUDs