Why do this in an online game?

People get mad when they work hard on something and it is taken away from them completely. What are the gains of the city? How many resources and how much time would it take to build? How quickly could it be destroyed?

My guess is that destroying something is a lot easier and less expensive than building it.

What would be interesting is if the entire world was divided into acre sized plots of land. Some of these plots of land would initialy be owned by cities or governments the rest would be unowned wild lands. Players and cities can aquire more plots either though force, diplomacy or cash.

Players could have free range over there plots of land they owned. They could build buildings construct a town anything they choose.

Plots of land would also serve to gauge the power of varius factions since there could be an world map that shows ownership of plots of land.

Player could also use there plots of land to control vital resource centres like purchasing a mine. Then highering NPC to guard it as well as charging other players a fee to use the mine.


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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

I really like these kinds of ideas... I think that to maintain this kind of thing you would have to have a lot of NPC''s running around. Otherwise, what would stop the King''s bodyguards (or whatever) from assaulting him in a coup? Granted, these kinds of things do happen, but in a virtual world, they''re bound to happen more often.

The key elements of MMORPGs are twofold: Balance, and Chaos. Any ORPG has to be balanced so that one person alone can''t *easily* mess the whole game up (king + bodyguard example). It should be able to happen if they try *really* hard, but there should still be some balancing elements in place to control the compelled. The second part, chaos, would prevent it from becoming completely boring. Having resources in plenty, but not easily defended... makes a tempting target for raids... etc. Give people a chance to do "major" things, without them being really important.

Anyway, that''s the best I can do to explain my MMORPG philosophy.

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Yes... VB6 is here to steal your minds. Very slowly.

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Original post by dink
My guess is that destroying something is a lot easier and less expensive than building it.

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I would think that it would be harder to destroy one, especially one of any signifigance. You have to organize an army, which could be horribly hard because high level players will not want to loose their charecters and will therefore be reluctant to go into open war. Low level charecters would not accomplish much and would fall fast to the hands of the enemies. Nobody would risk losing a charecter for no gain, there needs to be signifigant loot in the opposing city. You have to defeat the guard and the troops that are sent out to defend. It sounds quite hard to destroy a well established city to me.

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Why do this in an online game?

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Because that is the only type of game it would work in

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People get mad when they work hard on something and it is taken away from them completely.

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If sombody is not willing to take the risk that they might lose it then why build it in the first place. Also part of building a city is making sure it has enough defence. If nobody was allowed to attack cities the game would be boring, because nothing signifigant would ever happen.

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What are the gains of the city?

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You get money, power, control.

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How many resources and how much time would it take to build?

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Depends on the scale, im sure most cities would start out pretty small, but gradually increase in size and strength over time, as the builders funds increased.

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How quickly could it be destroyed?

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Very much dependant on its size and strength vs. the oppositions size and strength. The city wont neccisarily lose, especially if its well protected and populated. If you are talking about how long a war would aprroximatly last, it would depend on the combat system. With the one i am thinking of maybe half an hour, thats very estimated though.






I think everybody is thinking of a game like this wrong. I''m not talking about a game where your mission is to build a city and desroy others. What i have pictured is like a grand theft auto of MMORPGs. In grand theft auto you are in a city and you do what you want, of course it is limited but i think GTA gave you the more freedom than any other game i''ve played. In the MMORPG, you are in a country (or whatever it is), and you can do what you want.

here are some ideas I had about how a game of this sort may look

Start:
When the game first starts there will be one large centered city, built by the game creators. This city would be large enough to accommodate everybody, and would have good resources for low to mid-ranged characters. When you begin the game you start with a house here. The rest of the world would be various types of terrain, and quest areas.

Cities:
The size of a city would determine the amount of residents it was capable of having. For every house that was in the city there could be X(I don’t really know how high this should be, I don’t have enough MMORPG experience) residents. The X number of residents all share this house, but when you go in it is like only you are the only person who owns it ie. If somebody else who also owned it also went in, it would be like you were in 2 different houses. In a house you have storage, and a place to sleep. The grouped housing eliminates massive fields of houses. In cities there are stores (these are NPC controlled, and people who craft items sell it to these shops, and the shops sell them to other people. What level of items that the NPC buys are predetermined.) bars, inns (for people just visiting the city). A city has NPC protection. You can hire Scouts, Guards, and Police. As the level of NPCs that you buy increase their weekly cost increases. Scouts alert the city of hostile, or outlawed people coming towards the city, guards will try to stop these people from entering. The amount of scouts and guards you have determines the size of an invisible circle around the city. If you commit a crime (like attacking, or just hostileing) within this ring then the guards will put you in jail (for X amount of time) or if your up for the challenge you can try and fight them off. If hostile people manage to enter the city it is the polices job to try to stop them. There are stables in every city that allow fairly fast no-risk transportation between them, You can only go to allied cities from these stables and it costs money.
Building:
The minimum requirements for building your own city is 2 houses, an inn, a shop, a stable, Your (the builders) residence, and a wall around the city. Even a city this small would take a fair amount of money to create, and might be easily destroyed if there is not enough NPC protection. When people buy houses in the city, or buy items, or stay at the inn, or use stables to travel, that money goes into the cities fund and pays the NPCs, and goes into a fund for building more onto the city. The higher end building you purchase the longer they will hold up under attack. Villages can also be built, in a village, everybody pays for their own house, and there is no one single ruler, everybody controls their own house. A village might be started by one person building a house in the woods and a few other people doing the same.
Attacking:
You can only hostile a city from outside the city walls. If a single person hostiles a city then the policemen and guards will deal with it, if he/she is able to get into the city then they can attack people in the city. If a party (2-10 people) attacks then the people in the city will be alerted and the NPCs will try to deal with it. If a city declares war on another city, then the residents of the cities will be alerted, and anybody from the other city who enters that ring around the city is considered hostile. This will go on until hostilities cease or one city is conquered (the builders residence is destroyed). Destroying a building is like how it is in RTS games, they have life meter and you attack until its dead.

Quests:
I haven’t thought about this one much, all I know is that they should be voluntary.

Combat system:
Tactical RPG, like the final fantasy tactics battle system. Unless under special circumstances, all creatures are considered hostile towards you, and either you or them can initiate an attack on the other (you go into tactical RPG battle). If you are hostile towards a player then either of you can initiate an attack. If your party is hostile to another player/party, then anybody can initiate an attack on any player of the opposing party and everybody is brought into a battle (this means there is a 20 person max in a battle). So a war would be like a whole bunch of these large party battle going on at once.

Job System:
You choose 2 combatant type skills ( swordsmanship, archery, necromancy) 1 non-combatant type skill ( armorer, alchemist, bowyer ). These skills increase as you use them, Like every time you attack with a sword you get experience in the swordsmanship bar and once that’s full your swordsmanship levels up. You get more sword using privileges at higher levels. For things like making bows you would need more skills, and find better materials, to make better weapons.

[edited by - MTT on February 2, 2004 3:11:30 PM]

Just skimmed the last posts so I migth repeat something already said, please bear with me.

First of all, I think you're on the rigth track MTT, I believe that the reason to why I haven't kept playing any mmorpg for any great length of time and why I'm no longer willing to pay up for a game I wouldn't play much is that most current MMO*s is far too restricted. You're stuck levelling/questing/mob hunting/whatever because the designer of the game intended for you to do that, which pretty much leads to everyone playing "single-player" mmorpgs (in that they aren't interacting much with each other)

The only games I've seen some signs of more freedom is Project Entropia and EVE-online(haven't played EVE, but I've heard some of it)

In Project Entropia, everything ingame can be traded for real world money which means that people all of a sudden got a reason for doing things, everyone wants to try and get some IRL money. That made trading and crafting very appealing and the economics system became very stable. The game had no quests whatsoever so people usually ran errands for each other, usually selling/buying stuff. The problem however was that none of this caused any large-scale effects. There was just player/player interacting, you never saw any LARGE groups interact in any organized way.

EVE seems to be a little towards the same. As I've understood it, the things you can do is mining/trading/bounty-hunting. All of theese pretty much requires player/player interaction, and sometimes small groups of battleships in case of bounty-hunting highlevel pirates. It seems to offer interaction in a similar way to PE above, in that it doesn't give away premade "quests" and other things that removes the freedom. It does however seem to supply something that's not present in PE; the (player)pirates seems to be able to cause quite a big ruckus and people are willing to pay large bounties on them, which leads to small fleets/groups of bounty hunters taking on powerfull pirates. <---There's some (somewhat)large-group interaction.

I believe what's necessary for something like a freeform MMO* to work is that you give the players some reason to interact with each other (opposed to, like in most games present, FORCING them on the players. *cough*DaoC*cough*).

Imagine a scenario something like; a fantasy world where a certain artifact placed at a certain position in the world cause all, say harpies, to get 10% more resources when collecting them. HOWEVER, the catpeople loses 20% strength when the said artifact is in place. Now guess which group would rally rogether and try to destroy/capture/misplace the artifact and who would fiercly defend it? hm?

Something else I would like to see in a freeform mmo* is some secrecy about what's happening. I mean, how much fun is it if you can read on the developer homepage "Okay, now the quest of the Big Cookie where you must slay three(!) EvilGuy(tm) to reclaim the fabled cookie of 3+ gobling bashing"? Let the players find out things for themself for crying out loud! (Something I believe StarWars Galaxies did when not telling people how to become Jedis..and also causing Jedis to be forced to try and stay unnoticed because of unwanted attraction)

Ok, I guess that's the end of my rather long and probably incoherent post.

Oh. One final note

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Quests:
I haven’t thought about this one much, all I know is that they should be voluntary.

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PLEASE! leave this EVIL out of an idea that started out so well.

-Luctus

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Statisticly seen, most things happens to other people.
[Mail]

[edited by - Luctus on February 2, 2004 5:06:14 PM]

Here are some of my thoughts on the subject...

There would be both NPC and PC cities. The NPC cities would be, perhaps, capitols. The king/president/dictator/some ruler would own all the land in the country, but you can rent it from him if you''ve earned enough money. On that land you can do whatever you want. I think it would be bad if a mob destroyed your hard-earned shop you built, but perhaps you can get your buildings insured. However, rival players have a chance to outbid you for land from the ruler. If a player or group of players is able to buy enough land, they could possibly build a substantial city.

I think having an NPC capitol is important for new players because the environment would be better balanced, and most likely friendlier.

One idea I think is intruiging is if you have limited storage on your character, but you want to keep stuff, so you have to buy land and build structures to store it. Then you hire guards. These guards would then become monsters other players kill for experience. Hence you would never have a shortage of new dungeons to explore. Although, the dungeon maker has to provide some means to complete a dungeon, it can''t be impossible.

Here are a few similar and not-so-similar threads you might want to check out:
Online game idea - politics & conquest
Testbed for intergalactic political machinations
Narrative interpolation (might be useful)

You might as well check this one out, too, because it links to lots of other threads which hash related issues to varying extents:
Ode to [Game Design]

Of course, it''s always more fun to write than to read what has been written. Why do you think programmers always want to "throw the old engine out"?!

It could be interesting if players could bid for npc postions. Using quest points, money or other acquisions the winning player would then replace that npc. There would a minium bid for each npc. So for instance if a player wanted to become the lord of market town a town filled with shops, the minium bid might be 10,000,000 points(points are gold, quest points, items, etc..) player A''s final bid at the end of a week is 15,000,000 points, player B''s final bid is 20,000,000 thus player B becomes the lord of market town. Gaining the benefits of that position, such as being able to put a tax on all transactions done in the city to fill your coffers.



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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

The best way for people to establish dominance in any social setting, large or small, is through combat. Problem is, if a player dies in combat, the player is pissed because he/she has to start all over again.

If each player could be a kind of parasitic spirit (good, evil, whatever) and could latch on to and control any of a large population of NPC humans, we could avoid the whole problem with death. After a player dies in combat, the spirit could simply find another host, carrying with him all his skills, and material wealth could simply be recollected in the world. There would be, of course, some consequences to the transfer, but a player wouldn''t lose all his hard work.

The system would have to allow players to engage in combat and pledge allegiances to other players. In this way, entire hierarchies could be created as the losing players give in and pledge allegiance to winning players (if you can''t beat ''em, join ''em). Most probably, newbies will place themselves under the command of more experienced players without a fight, and grow their skills fighting rival groups. Human NPCs would latch on to leaders based on wealth and probability systems.

The hierarchies should eventually lead to two or more gigantic groups. If one group comes to dominate the MMO world, then the group will become unstable and collapse. In this way, there will always be conflict.

As for building, you could make a building design system (like in The Sims) coupled an RTS system and produce customizable buildings in the world. This would require monetary resources, but the leader of a large group could collect this through taxes. This tax money would be distributed among groups of NPC human builders, and the players could recollect this money through exploitation of the NPC humans. The functions of the buildings themselves could also be used to create profits.

Anyway, I think that through a ''safe'' combat system, players could create large-scale events in MMORPGs.