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If I made an MMO
Aaror
Member Posts: 25
Here are the things I would like to see in an MMO:
1. Factions. More than 2, in fact, probably either 6 or 8. With 2 or even 3 factions, you tend to see one quickly dominate, and that just isn't fun. Especially for team PVP battles, with two factions, if one dominates, that faction can never get into a battle, but with multiple factions the dominant team can play a "desperate alliance," of players from other factions.
Also, your race should not determine your faction. Orcs may start with a "favorable," reputation from the Warbands or Maul, and a "disliked," reputation from the kingdom of Valor, but if you want to play an honorable orc, just do quests for the kingdom of Valor and you will quickly become friendly with them.
Players "pledge," to a faction to join it, but they can do missions for any faction they are "disliked," or better with. Changing factions once you are pledged requires a special quest. Most quests will gain you reputation with one faction, and lower your rep with another faction. In fact, you can easily find "raid quests," in any faction territory to attack homes or castles of another faction.
2. Player created content. Two reasons for this, one is that the biggest problem MMO's have is that the adventures get boring. There are only so many quests or locations even the best games can afford to design, and once you have done all of them 3 times, well, it is old. Meanwhile Little Big Planet and similar games are creating loads of adventures that people love to play. The other reason is that it is fun to create content (otherwise Little Big Planet wouldn't have 3 million adventures).
That being said, there are a lot of difficulties. Starting with the danger of the difficulty or rewards not being balanced. After all, having a quest where you have to kill one pigmy ant, and you get the sword of godslaying from it, wouldn't be fun for most players, and it wouldn't be fun to the remaining players when one of the players who does like it games the system.
This is fixable though. First, while the creater of the adventure can pick the "recommended level," the damage players receive in the adventure will scale the recommendation quickly. Also, the first five players will get their item mailed to them, and the items received from beating the level will scale to the recommended level determined after it has been played a few times.
The other is "how much can someone make." Again, this isn't difficult to set. When players receive gold and items from defeating monsters or beating quests, they also will receive gems and materials. Materials (stone, wood, etc.) can be used to build houses, castles, and other structures. Gems can be used to hire guards or buy pet monsters. Both of these items won't take bag space (or will fill a seperate bag of some sort), so that players won't have a reason to ignore this treasure. Players can also trade these items for regular goods or gold at whatever rates they want.
If you make a house or castle, you can place items of any sort in chests, which can't be "robbed," by other factions. Guilds can create a central space for their guild members to make buildings, and can "teleport," the buildings of one member per day to where the rest of the guild is building. Guilds can also make special buildings that help the whole guild.
3. Taylored guilds. Guilds should have a "talent tree," like players, with different advantages that help different types of players. It should be possible to change a guild slowly to a different type (from levelling guild to raiding guild), but it should not be easy to quickly change back and forth. Players should be able to be part of a "clan," as well, this is a group with low game effects, aimed at allowing players to share items between their characters (if you have 10 characters on a server, mailing items is a pain). You can also have trusted friends or family in your clan. All that a clan does is provide a shared item chest.
If people seem interested I will expand on my ideas.
Comments
I voted for 2, because I'm not a big fan of unspoken rules. If I'm going to play in a game with PvP (which I seldom do), I want to see a red name and think 'My entire life's purpose is to kill that guy, and his entire life's purpose is to kill me.' The notion of seeing an attackable player but having a social restriction that says you shouldn't attack him—because he's a member of an unofficially allied faction—is unappealing. Social restrictions are the root of all ganking. If the community says "you shouldn't", and you can respond "but I can so I will", I'd rather steer clear of the game.
I'm not crazy about giving abilities or bonuses to guilds, because I feel that people should join (and stay in) a guild because of the people in it. Even a small in-game bonus rubs me the wrong way. And I dislike player-created content and don't want to see developers or other staff wasting their time with it.
I voted for 3. 3 is the absolute minimum for a solid faction warfare PVP game. It's also a more realistic number. Because if you have all the players spread across too many factions, you might run into small population. Usually it's a better idea to keep all the players in focused regions, which gives the impression there are more players in-game. If you can guarantee there will be tons of players per faction, then definitely make as many factions as you want!
Completely off-topic.. but why do you keep placing commas at the end of quoted words? It's very distracting. It's messing with my chi.
Your first two points already tripled the cost of making your said MMO. I know people hate the idea, but when considering making something of this scale, you have to look at financial first then work with what you have afterwards.
The argument that 3 factions creates inbalance with just one faction dominating doesn't hold water. Anytime you have more than one faction there's a chance for the playerbase to stack one side. The more factions you add, the more chance for one faction to out-populate the others, since the remainder of the player base is spread out more.
That being said, I voted for 3 factions because if one faction ends up with more players the other two can band together to equalize it. Temporary alliances. More than 3 factions just seems like too much, and two seems too few. In my opinion Dark Age of Camelot did it's PvP the best out of any MMO so far.
Regarding number of factions, there are two considerations:
1. Team PVP (battlefields). In this case, you want 3+ factions (imho), because if one group outnumbers the other 2+, it is still OK as long as all the smaller factions added together are at least close to the size of the largest faction. Imagine you get 20 folks in the largest faction wanting PVP each 10 minutes. One option is to take members of the other factions that want PVP, grab 20 of them, and put them in an "unholy alliance" against the largest faction. The other is to have 12 from the large faction battle 12 from the next largest faction, and the other 8 fight 8 from another faction.
2. Regular PVP (open world). Initially this does run into the "informal alliance" issue. That said, if you attack someone in a "friendly" faction, it shouldn't start a war between factions, it will just lower your rep with that faction (and perhaps get that faction gunning for you). Factions shouldn't be "friendly," towards eachother, but should be able to talk, and players are free to be friendly or not. That said, there would probably be a forest type faction which is somewhat friendly with the tribal type faction and the plains type faction. The plains type faction is probably friendly to the miner faction. The tribal faction might be friendly with the barbarian type faction, etc. Of course the forest type faction (elves and friends) won't like the miner faction (dwarves and friends) and the plains faction (humans and friends) won't like the barbarian faction (orcs and friends). This doesn't affect players in play, it only affects the initial rep that your race gives you.
The way I would want to do "player created content" would pretty much require a lot of fighting with other factions, since that would be the best source of adventures and money. If I'm going into your faction's area to break into your faction's homes and castles and steal your faction's loot, you have a pretty good reason to gank me, even before I break into your home...
(regarding putting a comma in any set of quotation marks, it is what I was taught in English class, but I have found every English teacher has their own thoughts...).
As for why I wanted 6 or 8 factions, well...
My idea (such as it is) was that players could work for multiple factions, even though they had good reason to "pledge" to one faction. A primary source of both gold and adventures is a combination of raiding the homes of other factions, and doing quests that other factions created. 3 factions means you only can play 66% of the player created content. 6 factions gives you 83%. Each faction would have one area, plus one "Moderator developed" area in the middle. Since you will only be in your own faction area to visit/design your home or visit your guild, most of your time is spent in other faction's areas. I suspect I was unclear in my first post about this.
Because the "faction territories" are not part of the main area, and will need a loading screen (or portal) to enter anyway, you could put them on a different server or servers. This means that instead of one server for each 10,000 players, you can have 50,000 players on a "world server," with 3-6 sub-servers handling the load of the faction territories. Effectively you get more players in your faction this way, I think...
Of course if you don't have enough players for one world, this doesn't help, so that is a flaw in my plan.
(btw, I have no idea how many players most games have per world server, I am merely pointing out that this system lets you put more players per world).
Here are some things I would use;
1. Open-Source; MMO's are like "Compuserve" was in the 1980s/90s. They want to own the entire thing.
What if I made it so Corporations could attach on and build content in my game like hubs? Sort of like the Zynga model is with facebook.
So while user created content using GUI would be nice, imagine for instance if Blizzard let another company add content on to WOW, within certain guidelines.
2. Strategy elements: not "real-time", I get exhausted when I think about an MMO that is going to require me to check in daily or else my empire is bum-rushed.
Imagine this:
the player can "portal" to this (so there is a unique instance for you, and anyone you invite to it, including your guild)
In this game you start with a fiefdom, if you were envisioning a typical World of Warcraft setting, it may work like for a dwarf it looks like a Mountain Keep, for an Elf perhaps a Forest Tower, for a human something like Elywnn Forest/Goldshire where it's this little village.
(If the setting were space or some more unique setting, obviously I'd use different starting base origins).
As you play, you can completely ignore this place, or you can add to it. Add a mage's tower, or a blacksmith shop to open up vendors/crafting stations. Eventually these are automatically providing you with resources and raw materials. Your ore mines produce more copper for you, etc.
If you complete a particular quest, your people may build a statue to you, etc.
As you play, you get unique quests from within your world. These may make your village more unique, because they will slowly change the "Alignment" of the province. Dark and Forboding, Bright and Glorious, etc.
3. You can PVP your keep when you are online, by "Invading" someone else's keep through a matchmaker system, the guards from your faction attack the guards from his faction and naturally you acting as commanders direct where they are going to go and run around on the battlefield.
Unique loot drops help you develop your keep and expand it.
So that eventually your small woodland keep could become a glorious city by the time you are at endgame.
Your point about the two smaller beating up the bigger is good on paper. What happens in the real world is the bigger two would crush the smaller. Heck, even in board games, such as diplomacy (a seven faction game), you see the most powerful working to eliminate the weaker.
Perhaps it's time for something different. Like some of the idead that Dragon Empires had.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/314378/Player-Created-Content-for-an-MMO.html
Posted a link to my other post on this topic (bad me!)
I re-read the responses to my first post, and realized I had forgotten to address why I think the guild talent tree.
I kinda agree with the poster, ideally guilds are just folks you like to play with. That is why I wanted to have "clans," who can share items/gold, and that is it. Having guilds as something different allows clans to be your friends, while guilds are your "support."
If guilds are the people who will back you up, but you don't have to trust them with the keys to the treasury, why do they exist? Well, I see two uses. One is that guilds are able to cluster their homes/castles/dungeons near eachother, and develop related quests, which makes more fun IMHO. The other is that some players like to help others, and a guild helps you find the folks who want to help you, or who you want to help. Other players like to do group PVP, and having a group of like minded players you can draw on without doing a "global chat" request is nice.
A lot of MMO's let guilds boost abilities in various ways, and if your guild is not a "extra item storage location," that makes some sense. My thought borrows from Runes of Magic, where you can build structures in the guild area to provide various benefits. They also require that you choose which structures to build, since there are limited spaces. I think instead that you should have certain "basic buildings" that are not compatible, so if you build the "raid portal" then you can't build the "rescue portal." If you build the raid portal, you can build various structures that help in group PVP. If you build the rescue portal, you can build various structures that help senior players help junior players. If you want to build the other portal, prepare to tear down most of your buildings (getting only 50% of your resources back) and start building again. Buildings would require significant time to build, which also helps encourage a guild to pick a path and stick with it.
Now, for the idea on player created content. As I see it, the "lowest cost," is a tile format. You can make 10X10X10 boxes, premade from a graphics perspective, and stack them together. For construction you use an overhead view, with a key or button to look at the level above or below to make sure ladders and staircases match, and an option to go back to first person anywhere in your dungeon to see how it looks. Then you buy guards and place them in one tile. They can move a certain number of tiles based on the game's attack distance, and you can buy extra guards beyond that distance at a significant discount (say 90%) because the difficulty of a dungeon with 5 encounters isn't much higher than the difficulty of the hardest single encounter. Traps also are placed in one tile, and are invisible until activated. The entrance tile has to have an open path to the "treasure tile" to be a valid dungeon. It is a lot "cheaper," from a programming perspective to drop tiles than to design world areas the way developers do, and a lot easier on the player.
The areas for player content would have "roads" which would be actual roads in the areas. They would also be reference points, so that you don't have to rely on landmarks to find your target. This is especially important since someone who does the change faction quest or joins a new guild might have to move their castle or dungeon, so a key landmark may just disappear! There would probably be a "forwarding address" for a month or so at the former location so you can't move your area in order to avoid being raided.
I'm not a fan of "factions" in the World of Warcraft sense (opposing rigid factions). That limits game play and been done too many times.
I long for an open faction system where players can join any based on their actions in the game. Something like EverQuest. I don't like Symetrical or game balance. I love randomness, I love knowing that playing that faction means hard difficulty while if you want you can befriend with these people for easier experience.
That was pretty much what I was proposing. Players start relatively "neutral" to the factions, liked by some and disliked by others based on race, but it is easy to join any faction. I did want to require a special quest to change faction, so people don't do it too easily, but that is only after deciding on a faction to join.
I do like to have factions, it makes the world more real I think. Players should not be locked into being "on one side," in the world. You should be able to be good or evil, and have NPC's that work with you despite your choice, and other NPC's that dislike you because of it.
OK, I cancelled this poll, and it won't go away, wth???
To be honest this whole faction stuff, PvP and sort of is so old...
I can't imagine a more boring thing as fighting "good vs bad" these days. New stuff needs to be invented.
Open your mind
I voted for one faction only. I've no desire to compete in an MMO in any way, shape or form.
some more thoughts:
Crafting. While crafting allows you to create items, the primary purpose is to modify existing items. You need to be able to make items first, but a crafter will be able to change the stats on items and improve the durability. Crafting might also make building or getting guards cheaper. Or you might be able to make weapons for your guards, making them more powerful without having to pay more?
Related, items should slowly deteriorate, not a quickly as most game, but not as repairable either. After a max of 100 hours of play, your item should be toast! This makes adventure items and crafting more important.
My wife suggested seasons, with different animals at different times of the year. I would like to play with that concept, having monsters "like" certain temps, and retreat to dungeons when the temperature gets too high or too low. This could lead to an area with mostly orcs in the winter, and mostly trolls in the summer, with the tribes that are not on the surface still found in the caves (and in larger numbers since they are not on the surface). The seasons would be tied to the real world, so you would know what to expect. A day/night cycle would be nice too, but it would have to be tied to a location Which might be confusing if you are in Europe playing on a US server and night "starts" at 2 AM.
Three factions is a nice number to me right now.
With two...well two has been done to death and I'm tired of it.
With 6 or 8...at this point, a lot of the factions would either become useless, or the whole thing would be too convoluted imo.
Three is a nice number.More involved than two, but not excessive to the point one faction becomes completely irrelevant from a diplomatic point.
My factions:
First, yes, they are generic and dumb, I'm sure a better writer could come up with better, but I want something where each faction has a few "frienly factions," but their friends are opposed.
Queen of the elves, friendly to woods, can be hostile to civilization and some crafting (chopping down lots of trees to make a huge building or to burn as fuel for a forge makes her mad). Tends to like the human and troll factions.
King of the Humans, like plains (if there is a halfling type race, they probably start as human friendly). Wants to plow more land and build larger cities. Hostile to tribal or barbarian societies (people who don't adknowledge ownership of land). Tends to like elf and dwarf factions
Lord of the Dwarves, likes hills and caverns (if there is a gnomish race, they may be Dwarven allies, or there might be forest gnomes who hang with the elves). Tend to regard woods as fuel, and tend to see goblins as competition.
Leader of the Troll Tribes, Likes open spaces to ride or run. Likes woods or plains, but dislikes those who fence land in. Tends to get along with elf and goblin factions.
The Bugbear, leader of the goblin tribes. They live in caves and tunnels, and fight the dwarves for territory. Some are rigid and regimented, others have learned swarm tactics from the orc. Tend to like the troll and orc factions.
Orc Hordeleader, likes swamps but sometimes found in hill caves. Dislikes civilization and trees (which suck up the water and kill their crops with drought, orcs eat rice and some other foods that only grow in standing water). Friendly with goblin and dwarf factions.
Undead (expansion faction?) Wants to take over all territories, and convert all characters to some type of undead (zombie, vampire, or lich). Players are allowed to join this faction, and can take an undead form if they are part of the faction and do a special quest. Each undead type gives plusses and minuses that affect the base race, but any race can be any type of undead.
Chosen (expansion faction?) Granted abilites divine or profane, and any player who gains their support takes on visual cues that indicate it to anyone who sees them (devil horns, angel wings). Two factions with similar effects, so I lumped them together.
The Dragon King (expansion faction) seeks money and treasure, and only involved in politics if it affects that wealth. can grant minor draconic abilities to it's favored, which tends to cause visual cues (dragon wings or scaly skin).
Keep in mind that "in my MMORPG," it is less about "making my faction uber and winning" and more about "finding cool adventures raiding the other factions." So more factions means more content, more adventures, and hopefully more fun!
Also, group PVP "battles" will often be "desperate alliance," battles, based on faction sizes. If a lot of folks are supporting the Undead, the undead may get into a battle against a last alliance of orcs and humans, dispising eachother but trying desperatly to save their homes. Later the demonic faction might battle the elves and dwarves, united by their desire for good to triumph over evil. Of course, the elvish queen might be subverted by evil, in which case the celesials and the humans might battle the elves...
Three factions = checks/balances, if world PVP is at stake.
But honestly I don't seek PVP at all from MMORPGs anymore so it could be 1-faction for all I care.
...now MMOFPSes on the other hand...
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I prefer the sandbox way of allowing player-driven factions.
If that is not possible, I'd like to see no less than 3.
I think factions have been over done. Lately it seems that the only purpose of factions is to draw you into a fight against another faction who is somehow an exact opposite. I don't want to be pegged into a faction just because I roll a particular race/class, I want it to be a choice I make based on the rewards or percieved benefits that I might get out of belonging to that faction.
I'm a firm believer that a community makes a game, and I like the role of player politics within the game. I think leaning towards a guild vs guild type setup would be a great breath of fresh air, similar to the corp system in EVE. Simply start off with everyone KOS to one another, and only having guild members unflagged. It'll bring people closer, make guilds and alliances more important, and give it a 'new' twist to the game instead of just blanket hate because the other faction has 'green skin'.