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Death and Sandboxes and Ecosystems
Cuathon
Member Posts: 2,211
In my sandbox mmorpg I have a huge problem. In the incidence of a raid on a player town, how do I deal with the dead? The game is not instanced so I can't simply kick a dead player out. Assuming its their hometown and they set their respawn point there every time they died they would just respawn right there and be able to continue the fight.
Now for larger creature attacks I will have to live with some sort of player respawn being able to affect the event. But in the instance of just a single player settlement I have to decide how to handle it. Because you can't allow for permadeath in an MMORPG all sandboxes have to deal with this issue. Themepark are essentially like srpgs which have savepoints. They generally can allow for death mechanics that don't limit the player too badly and they are static so you can't ruin the game. For instance in a raid or instance you just get kicked out and your success and failure has no effect on anyone else's game.
Another problem that I have is losing player settlements. Raids are generated semi randomly with some player actions having an effect. Essentially there is a series of triggers and requirements for a raid to happen and players can interrupt them.
Some information on the raid system:
Raids will only happen, obviously, if there is a player settlement within a creatures territory. Most groups far out in the wilderness will not travel super far to do a raid.
Some creatures exist in groups in which case they are more likely to launch a small to medium raid. Although there are no orcs or goblins there are creatures that function similarly. These groups are likely to not have powerful creatures involved. Generally these groups will attempt to gank individual travelers on the roads and in the wilderness. They will likely have some sort of aggression trigger to start a raid.
Raids can be lead by a powerful "raid leader" monster. In this case its a form of hierarchical dominance. Generally these raids are rarer and easier to prevent because their event chain is longer. Lead monsters come to exist in a variety of ways. Some come into the world with higher intellect and the ability to oppose their will on weaker creatures. Others evolve through various processes.
Examples of creatures who come into the world capable of leading large groups of creatures are higher level demons and devils, abominations, spirits, and so forth. There are also various kinds of elementals that exist in hierarchies. Generally these creatures hold power over their own kind, weaker creatures of the same alignment.
Some creatures evolve into power. Wurms are one example. As they get older they approach sentience and can both exert authority over lesser wurms but can also call lower level creatures to change into wurmkin.
Other creatures are even more insidious and dangerous in their accumulation of armies. Certain species of monster of incredibly high power can exert an magical aura/field or infection which spreads from their lair and slowly expands its radius. Over time more and more creatures fall under their control. Depending on the creature type of the controller these new minions may experience buffs of various kinds. For instance they may become part of a hivemind which will allow more useful skills such as superior scouting and responses to danger. Some creatures may be drawn to the center of their bosses territory. This is a valuable effect for many reasons. For one, this allows new creatures to begin nesting in the territory that is vacated. This allows for the area of control to have access for more minions without increasing the pace of expansion.
In any case there are many sorts of mechanics for changing the mindscape of the untamed parts of the world.
The ways that players can deal with raids are things like killing off some creatures before they evolve or taking down control monsters. One can also control raids by keeping a creature population too limited to attack. Once a population reaches a certain point its aggression cycle begins. Essentially a populous creature group will release a raid of a portion of its members if there is a settlement nearby, otherwise it will simply grow. As the population grows scouts will be sent to patrol for humans. As soon as a settlement is found it will be attacked.
Given the nature of the human population spread it may be that a system will be needed whereby beyond a certain population level creatures will fight with eachother. I am not sure. Some special creature types will have an alternate strategy for population limitation whereby powerful creatures will absorb the lifeforce of weaker creatures for various purposes.
In any case I may have gotten a little off topic. In the case of death functions I was thinking of a few options:
A flagging system whereby players that die during a raid are flagged. They can have no effect on creatures or buildings in the raiding sphere and said objects will not interact with them either. Creatures from the raid will be tagged as belonging to that event. In the case that the raid destroys the area and eliminates all the players the flags will disappear and said players can interact again. The problem here is that players can immediately attack again this time without the raid limitations. I was thinking that probably after the raid the creatures will disappear back to their lair. Perhaps the event creatures will be invisible to dead players so that they can't be tracked back to their lair. As long as the raid doesn't stay put the problem would be reduced.
Perhaps the players will simply be unable to travel within a set distance of any raid creature so they cannot get back into the raid area. This feature will allow the same end result as the other feature. Dead players will not lose play time with a death timer of any kind and they will not be able to interfere or track the raiders back to their point of origin.
Not having a permadeath mechanic has many problems of a similar nature in a sandbox world. No matter how many times they die players will grow more and more powerful over time. That means that the environment has to grow more dangerous to provide danger and challenge. This provides something of a problem for newer players, unless you create a system that allows weaker creatures to continue to spawn in areas with a stronger human presence as wild areas become more and more dangerous as player power and territory grows. I am still devising a system to allow lower level spawns in areas near human presence in order to provide for newer players to level, although they do have the option of working with higher level players in groups to gain experience.
Comments
Have them respawn at the next closest city.
That would work, assuming that was far e nough away. I guess I forgot to mention that in my game there are no pre made cities. Players provide all the content including settlements through the crafting system. There are also no NPCs.
Death penalty of reduced stats and DPS by like 90% or something for 15-30 minutes however long you need.
Oh, and please let me know what this game is. Do you have a website up? I'd love to follow it lol
Can still have them spawn at the next closest city. Dynamic content doesn't affect that. Could also filter the possible spawn locations to prevent a person spawning in a warring clan's city.
You could also have some neutral spawn locations around your world. This would be one of the better approaches, as it would give far better control over reducing rezz camping. Shadowbane is an example of this. If your game doesn't have a low/zero PVP area, now is a GREAT time to start thinking of adding one.
You could give them an option of ressurection points on death or allow them multiuple bind points.
You're really not going to know how well any of these things work until you actually plug them in and see how the players use/abuse them.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
You could give them a choice of respawning immediately, but at a random location a fixed distance from where they die (e.g., guaranteed to take 5 minutes to get back) or waiting until the raid ends before respawning.
That second part is an interesting approach because it now takes'immortality our of the combat equation, significantly changing the dynamics of war. Barring the player from returning to the combat area in some manner might make for a neat twist on how PVP plays out. It would definitely change strategies, as zerg tactics would be reserved for when a large or strategic target is worth the possible loss of a good portion of your team.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
i don'e see a problem spawning in their own city. since they are the ones defending they should have the advantage
solution 1
you add cumulative penalties per death within a set amount of time. so for example, each death within 30 minutes will reduce ALL your stats by 20% up to a minimum of 20%of your max. (so you could die 4 times, each time incapacitating you further and further)
the respawn point should be in an invul area (inside the church that they would have to build in order to get a respawn point)
also you can add semi permanent item decay on what you have "equiped" ( your max durability reduces by x%)
and for the kicker, you give them the choice. of respawning back in your "church" or in a NPC city.
if you respawn in an random NPC church, you dont get to use any kind of teleportation device for 10-20 minutes forcing you to walk. Being a random NPC town , you get the whole defending party scattered.
solution 2
have an afterlife "hall of kings" of your party/alliance. and place as a game mechanic a 15-20 minute cooldown resurection regardless of death reason. put some minigames, and things to do in the afterlife to pass the time, hell it could be a cool way to have alliance/clan wtv only meetings. make it a guildhall type of place that they can modify and decorate and have perks in there, but in order to get there they have to "die"
here is also a fun thing you can do, you can leave the dead bodies in the world and have them glowing in celestial armors they can purchace just to be in the hall of kings... if you get resurected you get PULLED from that place without conscent. (of course resurection rules have to be balanced to avoid grieffing.
so fun new dimention of play style having a group of people locking themselves in a house and performing a suicide ritual, while one person is in charge of resurecting them (so they wont suffer the decay penalties or something)
Home field advantage seems fine as long as there are resources at risk each time you go into the action. Look at home a game like Eve functions: a character may respawn intact and be able to rejoin a fight happening next door to their clone facillity, but their ship (which can represent a huge investment) suffers permadeath.
For a fantasy setting, imagine the ghosts bargaining with a Ferryman bringing them back to a spawn point instead of the afterlife. If you have enough $resource to pay the Ferryman, he can take you wherever you want to go, even back into the middle of a raid. But the stronger the character and the most hotly contested the desired spawn zone is right now, the higher the price he will demand. It never becomes impossible to get back into the fight immediately, but It will usually be impractical.
Make the player be in a raid to effect raid targets. If a player dies give him a no raid debuff for 15 minutes. That way he can't effect raid targets if died.
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
Yes that is what the flagging system does. It was the thing I was thinking would be best.
I was thinking that players could respawn at the world gate which is where all players come in and probably the nexus of civilization. The only issue is that it takes a long time to get back to far off settlements.
I think that the spawn zone in a given town could be disabled during an attack on the town. I do also think that the guildwars style stat dropping might work as someone suggested. However I would have to write separate code for that compared to standard pve death where you just respawn at your bound respawn site.
If you started following it now you would be waiting a pretty long time
The game is called TenThousandSuns. There are like 15 threads on these forums about it if you just search for threads made by me. I guess I could convert my current site on my webhost to add a description of the game and features and such. It used to hold a space browser mmorpg that is like 90% complete but I decided that designing this game was just more fun. Currently I am using it to write some of my code in mysql/php/html/css/js. I can test a lot of non combat game functions with simpler languages that C++ and when I eventually make the switch it will be pretty simple to just shift the equations and variables and crap into C++ syntax.
I expect that if I worked really hard and accepted low level graphics quality I could get the game done in 2 or 3 years to the point where it function. The creatures wouldn't have very diverse model types or look super pretty though.
How are you going to handle situations where there's one player online and 20 attacking? What can the attackers gain or what results are at stake here? (I'm trying to get a handle on what you have in mind, maybe more than you want for this topic.)
Once upon a time....
One human player vs 20 monsters? I guess you would lose the town? There are some rts style constructions to help this though. You can build some defense towers, although there is a problem with players spamming defense towers, so it will probably be hard to make them. I will have to limit them in construction time and possibly hard to get materials, plus you need mages to enchant them. I may also do something like, towers all run on the same frequency so you can only play so many in a particular area.
You can also have scrying pools or crystals to detect incoming raids, but these would only be useful if the raid was a couple hours away and you had a way to contact offline players.
I think that to set up a town far away from the world gate where you will really only have guild mates to rely on would be difficult. You may wish to coordinate defenses or something also. I dunno, there are a lot of complexities to work out. And you wouldn't be getting raided every day or even every week.
I still have a lot of design work to do.
RTS style constructions are good. Siege weapons, supply lines, defensive towers, whatever. What you need is a long time frame, days, to allow players to react somehow without just logging in and finding their loss, and no way of having a reaction to prevent it.
I think you need to resolve this before you can finally resolve the bind stone issue.
If you go with this sort of idea, here's my first thoughts....
For an assault, require varying siege weapons built on site, which requires first a depot or supply line sort of construction. Days in time to do. This gives the defending players a chance to disrupt this, themselves or through hired or allied help, and prevent the attack or defend against it directly. This would go both ways, for players defending against a MOB assault or launching their own against a MOB stronghold.
Once a siege weapon is built, it starts attacking while more are built, send> the bind stone that an assault is underway.
Once an assault is underway, limit use of the bind stone to once per player character. After one use, the player character is shifted to another bind stone for the duration. Or you could not allow the first use at all. In these cases the players would still be able to travel by hoofing it, is this an issue?
In the case of something like a Dragon, they start attacking the walls and in effect are acting like a siege weapon, without a depot.
The entire event lasts until all attacks stop, plus a timer. This would require all attack siege weapons to be destroyed, or the Dragon or similar MOB leave. If the depots are still there, along with MOBs to rebuild the siege weapons, the event can start back up, or they could roll a random chance to give up the attack. Once the timer expires, the bind stone returns to normal.
I'm not sure if that works for you, but there's an idea.
Once upon a time....
Well players have a choice to build various walls, pretty much anywhere they want. Walls can be taken down by high level creatures based on the wall construction quality and material. There may be some sort of siege weaponry that certain creature types use I guess. Certainly humans can build it if they want. In alot of cases its is mainly high level monsters with physical or magical powers who will take down walls. A basic wooded fence or a wooden palisade can keep out most common creatures, but medium level creatures can get through eventually. I suspect that higher level mobs will be more common in raids, and most towns won't have stone walls anyways.
I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts, not on the death mechanics of raids, but the areas of authority and monster grouping and such described in the raid section of the original post. Do you guys think monster grouping mechanics like that would provide interesting environment interaction and such? These systems are what provide the plots points of the game. Its where the conflicts come from. Whole series and universes of novels like Dragon Lance and Forgotten Realms generate conflicts with demon lords and dragons and sentient artifacts and dark gods gather fell armies from lesser or allied races to attack civilization. I always wanted to see this happen in a game, and given the random and unstructured nature of the system, of course it can only happen in a themepark and not a sandbox.
Some people have complained that its hard to discuss some of the topics in my threads about game design because there are so many aspects of my game that are atypical. I have written up some more formatted and detailed information about all the aspects of the game; I currently have 24 topics.
I am still filling out some things and making tables for some of the math, currently the only topic up is about the rift based creature spawn system. I am going to sleep now cause my house gets cold and thus its hard to type cause of shivers, I will have at least basic info in most topics filled out tomorrow.
Just a note:
My game is a sand box that has way more sand than most "sanbdboxes" or as I like to call them, playgrounds. Playgrounds are somewhat similar to sandparks excepting that it includes an area on both sides of the sandpark line. TSW, Guild Wars, Darkfall, Everquest, and Ultima Online are all examples of a playground game. They usually have open worlds and less themeparky skill systems and often some decent crafting and building but they just don't have that much sand. They are more like less linear themeparks than a sandbox, but they are on various sides of the sandpark line. You have more freedom to play around but the game world doesn't really change per say. These types of games may have permanent non destructible dev designed cities, as opposed to totally player made settlements and political structures.
Kinda went off on a tangent there, in any case, if you aren't a serious sandbox fan the game probably won't appeal to you. PvE and magic are not similar to something you have ever seen in an mmorpg I suspect.
Note to mmorpg.com staff:
The site does not contain a forum, and does not have signups or any sort of inputs. It is more of a resource to discuss some pretty out there sandbox game design. It has no adds and links nowhere off of itself. I am not advertising a product or providing any services, so I hope you will not feel the need to delete the link and as far as I can tell using another site to create an easier formatting method as opposed to just a forum post here should not violate anything in your ToS.
The address is www.lordofthedawn.com and was originally obtained to use for a niche persistant browser and text based space browser game. None of that content is currently accessible.
i think it certainly would be interesting. problem is that in more or less all mmorpgs the problem is the opposite - it never come to effect since the players kill everything too fast
to prevent this you can do things like:
natural bariers - to open part of the world, players would have to cut through the unpassable forest, mine through/under the mountain etc.
mob base strength generated based on strength of players in the moment of first contact - when player will first encounter that type of mob, it will be as strong as most powerful player on server, so other player can over time "grow" into its strength and at the start they will rather "avoid" contact
cheat
- things like suddenly extra strong powers/spells some of the mobs will have etc.
btw, it is interesting how most of the ppl seems not to be able to read - you are writing about mob raids and they are talking about pvp ones
He had said the game is based on territorial control. He also said early in thsi thread that there are no premade cities - all cities are player made and all content is created by the players. In that light, The PVP aspect of the game is an intrinsic factor in the design of these raids and the respawning resulting from them.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
The thing about players killing everything too fast is not an issue. I am not sure if I discussed the rift function here, but rifts are what produce monsters, its not static like WoW or GW. Rifts scale to the player base of the server. The game does not have fast travel and it takes place on worlds with multiple continents separated by seas. If you look at the website on the rifts page, you can see how a rifts scale to prevent players from overwhelming the world. And there is no monster limit really. Indeed the game is set up so that a whole game world can be lost to the monsters if players aren't careful.
I love the idea, but I am constantly confused by your lack of belief in Sandbox. This is ideal for Sandbox, where you can't have Themepark level over level over level content. In a Sandbox, you still need a constant stream of content, but it needs to be able to shift instead of being locked into zones. You still have "levels" in a Sandbox, just not the ever increasing zones of levels.
You seem to think that Sandbox games require an ever building skill system (from some other post of yours), and I totally disagree. I think that Sandbox needs to shift the game play away from ever increasing powers, and to new powers as more options rather than more powerful, but mainly shift the focus of the game play towards what is happening in the world instead of levelling up.
What you are suggesting falls right in line with this.
Once upon a time....
I feel dumb, the last line of that quote should have themepark and sandbox switched. Fudge.
I do believe in an ever growing skill system because it prevents players from taking everything to the cap.
But then you're back to the need for zoning the world for content by level, only this time we put the tag of "skill" on it instead of outright calling it "levels".
So, trash your game, it won't work when uber players tear down in a day what mid "skill" player build. Or substitute MOBs here. Or, you know, zone your world according to levels called skills.
Edit to add: "Skills in a Sandbox should not act like "levels" in a Themepark.
Once upon a time....