One of my major philosophies for MMO’s is that the player (individually) cannot change the world. This is one reason why I do not believe in letting the players play kings, CEO’s, mob boss’s etc in games. My belief is that players should be able to influence the world through actions of large numbers of players, with reactions coming from the game. I.E. Population control of an area’s mobs. A player should not be able to wipe out an entire population of gnolls, but 80-100 players focused on the task could possibly do it. Please keep that philosophy in mind as I describe my thesis below. An MMO world, should be in its nature interconnected and complex. Players should be able to influence world events as a playerbase, whether they mean to or not. The world around them should dynamically change based on various factors that are influenced by actions the players take in the world. Almost every action the players take should be tallied, and stored until like water in an unbalanced bucket, turns over and spills out the consequences. When it comes to world building, a lot of games focus around making 2-3 competing factions, while this is workable, it does not create a dynamic enough playing field. Instead of a coldwar, 2-superpower conflict, I believe the game needs to be more of a middle ages Europe, with multiple nation states, on the verge of competition. This creates a suitable environment for interesting developments. My main method of dynamics is AI driven conflict between nations. The AI does not have to be sufficiently advanced, but each country should have its own “personality.” Conflict should encompass three types of conflict: Trade, Political, and Armed. In order to influence one of the three, players take up quests and missions, as well as just grind monsters, buy and sell goods etc. One must is a dynamic mission generation system. I use the word system because it needs to have multiple front ends, and maybe one or two middle processes, and multiple end processes. The front ends control what the type of mission is, who its for, who its against what you are doing etc. The middle processes take the input from the front ends, and generates the meat of the mission (map [if dungeon], area, enemies, waypoints etc) and the back ends take the results of the mission (success, failure, partial success, side objectives etc) tallies the numbers, and adds them to the conflict counters between nations. For example one front end may deal with political input from competing factions. In the back ground a pool of points is competed over by the factions, and each mission generated and played by the players creates a change in points. This causes more missions to be generated by other factions in order to make up for the loss of points by the first faction. The player chooses a few things like difficulty, length, style and goes off on the mission. Success or failure redistributes points against the pool, resulting in more conflict between these factions. Once a conflict breaks out between different factions, whether it be trade, political, armed etc. A nation should be able to build an alliance with another country to last for the duration of the conflict. Such an alliance would shift numbers and totals needed for a conflict to break out between allied factions making it harder but not impossible for conflict to break out. This also shifts numbers between the allied and warring factions making it much easer for conflict to break between them. Just like the numbers needed to generate a conflict there are numbers needed to end a conflict. These can be political, trade, or warfare as well. Diplomatic overtures may start springing up after a length of time of war, economies could decline, one side loses etc. However, a lot of these numbers, and missions needed to bring these events to an end are going to be generated by players actions.

you mangaed to put alot of the things that i thought about in text and also made it legeble

I'd have to actually completely agree with you. I always thought it would be nice to try and have a player run world in the sense that the players can be Kings, CEOs, etc. or just normal soldiers or something. After reading through that though I think that that might not be such a great idea as players often could screw things up.

Something like this allows players to have a sense of control, requires a lot of teamwork, and just keep things in order over all. It would also keep things fresh and new for the player providing plenty of missions and content. The AI aspect of the nations would probably require constant updates to do that though and may be best supplemented my developers working with it.

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Original post by Gixugif Something like this allows players to have a sense of control, requires a lot of teamwork, and just keep things in order over all. It would also keep things fresh and new for the player providing plenty of missions and content. The AI aspect of the nations would probably require constant updates to do that though and may be best supplemented my developers working with it.

Constant updates maybe, but the best thing about it would be that the AI would not need to be very memory intensive. In fact it could be a modification of any AI script for any of the Romance of the 3 Kingdom, civilization, total war, etc. games. And it does not need to be run constantly, if the scripts run once or twice a day it should be enough to keep everything going. I've been running some structure through my head on how I would have this system work and I've got a few ideas, though its not done by far.

There are twelve countries in an uneasy balance with each other. Each country contains 2-8 political factions that each fight amongst themselves for control of the country. Every faction has its own set of stats that determine which scripts it runs to guide the country.

Every faction of "intelligent" creatures in the world is tied to one of the twelve countries, a kill against one of them by a player of another country adds a point to the war pool. Missions taken against one country against another adds various points to the war pool. Alliances with countries at war with another country adds points to a war pool quickly. Once the war pool overflows, war is declared.

Once war is declared, the AI's switch to a war mode, and begin plotting the invasion of the other country (this description is based upon the contries being adjacent, I'm not sure what to do with non-touching countries).

Once the AI's decide which zone(s) to invade, it sets up a series of missions needed for completion of the invasion. Players must take these missions and succede at them. As the different missions (supply runs, raids, intel gatherings etc) get completed, the AI re-calculates the numbers needed. At the end of the time, a PVP battle is fought over the contested areas, with the outcome deciding who owns what territory.

On the order of trade, players collect raw materials in the world, and then turn them over to various merchants throught the world to get made into base materials. Players buy the materials, or other products made from those materials. Each base material is only made by 3-4 of the 12 nations. The country that gets the most raw materials produces the most base materials, and can then sell it at a lower price. If one country starts underselling another, the competition countries may boycott and outlaw that countries base goods. This leads to people requesting smuggled goods.

Diplomacy is the catch all mission group. Diplomacy is used to lower war pools (smooth the ice) Form alliances, negotiate prices, etc. If it involves non-competetive or counter competetive missions, then diplomacy is where its at.

Thats a more indepth low down...what do you think?

Dynamic worlds are a cute idea but they don't work gameplay-wise.

You won't get a lot of interested players when they can log on one day, see one world, log on another, and see something completely different that doesn't flow with what they saw before.

You'll get a few hardcore players who take part in all the events and changes, causing them and flowing with them.

I've given this a lot of thought and see no way to really let the player influence the world that couldn't be abused. (short of the changes reversing themselves with a cooldown time of mere hours which isn't really dynamic at all... flexible.. like elastic but not truly dynamic)

There seem to be a few tried and true philosophies in MMO's that developers see as old and trite and boring and overdone and too ingrained. These are things like linear gameplay, narrow specialization trees and skill systems, and static worlds.

They're wrong to consider these things bad. They are the best way to get a lot of players interested in and eventually comfortable with the game.

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My belief is that players should be able to influence the world through actions of large numbers of players, with reactions coming from the game. I.E. Population control of an area’s mobs. A player should not be able to wipe out an entire population of gnolls, but 80-100 players focused on the task could possibly do it.

What are you trying to say here?
If a player kills all the gnolls, they are dead/wiped out. Would you make them respawn just because one person is killing them? If not, how would you prevent one person from wiping out an entire population of gnolls? It seems pointless and would be frustrating to place this restriction.

Assuming one player isn't enough to kill them he needs a group. But that's already obvious.

As for AI controlling nations it would become boring quickly.
(sorry I guess I find pve mmorpgs boring compared to pvp ones).

[Edited by - stevenmarky on December 13, 2006 7:23:37 AM]

Well as was being said in the first post. About not letting players play as kings or the head of the world. Due to players have personal motives and that will dictate them more than what will benefit the world the best.

I am a personal supporter of giving the Illusion of control. I can not go into this further because i will give away core ideas i have been working on for years. But you can not walk away from the fact that there is a large player base that likes to strive to be a king or a controller over others. By not allowing this you take away a personal achievement from someone. And in an MMO environment its suppose to be a world. Where a player can live another life. By not allowing an option of character progression you destroy the suspension of disbelief. So something that you might want to consider. Is how do I let the player attain such positions that give them some bonuses but will not ultimately change the game in a horrid way. The Illusion of power.


Also Dynamic Worlds.

Something to consider is how dynamic does it really need to be. Think of this how long does it take to make an animal die all the way off. Or how long did it take for the Roman empire to form. These things to a LONG time to happen. So find what you think needs to be dynamic. And remember that you can have a very dynamic world without having to completel change the rules of play. Or the world for a player.

[Edited by - FadedPhoenix on December 13, 2006 11:53:16 AM]

Robert, me and some friends have been working for the past couple of months on an MMORPG client and server. We still have'nt found an exact idea about the game's 'philiosophy', as you refer to it. Maybe we could try to implement some of your ideas if you don't mind.
In order to do this, we need to first make a quite big query in some gamers forums to ask whether they would like to play this type of game. Also, it would nice if you could make a specific game play document describing the basic game's concepts. So if you would like to proceed with this idea, please reply to me. Thanks.

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Original post by sharpnova Dynamic worlds are a cute idea but they don't work gameplay-wise. You won't get a lot of interested players when they can log on one day, see one world, log on another, and see something completely different that doesn't flow with what they saw before. You'll get a few hardcore players who take part in all the events and changes, causing them and flowing with them. I've given this a lot of thought and see no way to really let the player influence the world that couldn't be abused. (short of the changes reversing themselves with a cooldown time of mere hours which isn't really dynamic at all... flexible.. like elastic but not truly dynamic) There seem to be a few tried and true philosophies in MMO's that developers see as old and trite and boring and overdone and too ingrained. These are things like linear gameplay, narrow specialization trees and skill systems, and static worlds. They're wrong to consider these things bad. They are the best way to get a lot of players interested in and eventually comfortable with the game.

That is a good point. Actually, there are perhaps instances when I've been away from some online game for a while and when I came back to it there were so many changes that I just didn't feel like playing. Things would constantly be changing in this case.

You log off for the night and when you get up the next day your nation is a war with two others. The easy way out of this would of course to not have dynamic worlds, but if have something like this work gradually it may be possible.

First of all having less nations to lower the changes possible would be a start. instead of 12 having three or four, maybe five, larger nations would probably work better.

Declaring war seems sudden and all, but having high War Pool cap would help immensely. Have it viewable to the player so they know when it's getting close and can expect war to be declared soon. Also nations being at war with one another would be a problem- and a likely one at that. Having allied nations or some kind of sensible element stream-lined (hopefully) into the world would also solve that potential problem. (Ah, I see you did have that. Encourage the diplomacy, then so you can guarantee players will do it. After all, fighting is probably proffered over that with most people.)

Just make sure there are plenty of mission, to be safe put in what you'd consider way too many- the more players there are the more missions your going to need. For the PvP battles you'd best use many smaller scale ones- the side who wins the most takes control of the territory. That's just to prevent too much lag with so many people in one match, but it's also possible to have them take place over time if that's needed as well.

Then with base building, just make sure stuff like that requires a lot as well.

This would at least with those problems Sharpnova mentioned, and hopefully make them manageable as well.

It is a problem, but I think it's something that developers should try to work with. A dynamic environment would just add so much to the game.

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Original post by sharpnova Dynamic worlds are a cute idea but they don't work gameplay-wise. You won't get a lot of interested players when they can log on one day, see one world, log on another, and see something completely different that doesn't flow with what they saw before. --- I've given this a lot of thought and see no way to really let the player influence the world that couldn't be abused.

The key is always to allow the playerbase (meaning alot of players, not just one person, or one group) to affect the game. So while it may be "abused" it takes alot of coordination to do. This is exactly what I have in mind. If a large group of players want to set the ball rolling to get country a to attack country b, and eventually take over all of its country, then they should be able to do it, but it should not be easy. Its like draining a pond with 100 people with 5 gallon buckets.

Also, even though I say dynamic, I do not mean day-to-day changes. Changes should take a while to take effect. It may take a month to for points to build up for a war to be declared, and another 2 weeks to a month or more for the war to get resolved.

Dynamic doesn't necissarily mean always changing, but the world should be allowed to change over time.

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Quote: My belief is that players should be able to influence the world through actions of large numbers of players, with reactions coming from the game. I.E. Population control of an area’s mobs. A player should not be able to wipe out an entire population of gnolls, but 80-100 players focused on the task could possibly do it. What are you trying to say here? If a player kills all the gnolls, they are dead/wiped out. Would you make them respawn just because one person is killing them? If not, how would you prevent one person from wiping out an entire population of gnolls? It seems pointless and would be frustrating to place this restriction. Assuming one player isn't enough to kill them he needs a group. But that's already obvious. As for AI controlling nations it would become boring quickly. (sorry I guess I find pve mmorpgs boring compared to pvp ones).

What I'm trying to say is that based on re-spawn times, and the time it takes to kill one, a single player, or a group of players won't be able to kill off the population before it re-spawns. However a large number of players could do it, reduce the population to 0, and have another group of mobs take thier place.