I think it's better to be rewarded for HAVING a structure than to be rewarded for taking it.
If every structure you had made you do 2% more damage (or whatever, some sort of boon for having it), it'd be important not to just to try to get structures, but to keep the ones you have too.
Gish, did you really call wow a "pvp centered game"?
LOL, no kidding, but he did say "failure of" with that. I always felt WoW could have been soooo much more, especially given its IP (building a kingdom to fight an enemy kingdom).
I'm hoping CU will be what WoW should have been. Players in the roles of the armies you controlled in Warcraft. Players build the keeps, towns, and paths between, a lot like a persistant RTS game. I like a lot of the ideas on here. I pray that the ideas expressed by Plastic-Metal, Stiler, and Gish can all be incorporated.
Make the safe area tiny with only the basic things player society needs to work. Let the players build the good stuff in the towns they create. Buildings that give bonuses to crafting, and the items crafted in them, with the ablity of being upgraded as long as the player's realm controls the town. Make it so that everything can be destroyed, but only the keep needs to be captured by the enemy to change possession of the whole town. The town can be added to only by the realm in control. The guild that controls the keep gets a tax from the players who own buildings in the town. The tax is variable based on realm, so that the guild can reward players of its own realm with lower taxes, while making life harder on players of the other realms who built here when their realm controlled the keep. But that is the price they pay for the attacking realm to not destroy the buildings outright.
Why would players from a far away realm build in an area that is likely to be controlled by another realm most of the time and possibly be destroyed? Because it is the ONLY area with a particular material needed for high end items! And if your realm is ever to get access to those materials, you will have to take this place at some point.
How Realm, Class and Server pride will be fueled by asymmetrical class design.
Here we have ingame footage of combat between TDD and Viking Knights leading into Viking versus Briton Knights. Note how the asymmetry has created so much pride for the Briton.
Gish, did you really call wow a "pvp centered game"?
I actually said the worst example of a PvP centered game...though, in looking back, I can see how the phrasing was misunderstood. The point was the WoW is nearly the antithesis of a PvP game, it had literally no PvP features at launch other than a few PvP servers and the ability to attack the opposing factions NPCs. However, in an environment devoid of "PvP features" it probably had more active and enjoyable PvP moments than most of the games being touted as PvP games today. Now that wasn't because the game had great PvP, lol. All of the great PvP memories players had from that time were forged on their own, because the game both allowed it, but also retained the "safety" so that players that were new to the experience, or nervous about joining it, weren't forced to or held back for it.
The point is, the best PvP moments I've ever had in a game had literally NOTHING to do with PvP mechanics or systems beyond the ability to stab someone and novel moments that enabled it to occur. I had more fun hunting a Paladin through the jungle because he killed my friends than I did playing the "PvP games" in most of the releases today. The best part of that story was that one of my friends had actually given me gold to help with a few quests (I didn't ask, but certainly didn't turn it down since vanilla mounts ate a wallet). In the process of helping him I killed about 6 people, for the lulz, as it were. I had just as much fun trying to escape the lot of them once they all teamed up to take me down.
The joy of that had nothing to do with a reward system. I did not earn gear or levels for it, if anything doing it kept me from doing the things that WOULD have rewarded me. We place too much concern on rewarding people for PvP. Its only meaningful when the PvP is the reward. It only happens when there is loss, though the loss needs to be something you can deal with. For WoW, the loss was constantly having to do ghost runs and getting shorted on your questing time. Not a big deal, but an annoyance that spawned plenty of fun times. Without ANY loss, and only rewards, PvP is just another loot machine and is ignored once the right toy pops out.
guild housing can only be put up in keeps. along with rewards for keeps like relics in daoc. your guild houses and merchants to sell items can only go up in keeps; your guild housing lot. there could be a limited number of housing lots. eventually you'll even need to put them up in other realm keeps. it would be nice to have guild xp and rewards but limit guild numbers. if you leave a guild you take your guild xp with you to your new guild. anyways i thought it would be cool if you could use your guild xp to build and level up your keep captain/commander and also if you could choose 1-5 players in your guild depending on level of guild to act as npc to defend your keep while offline. you could set up a predefined-AI for your npc and commander. keeps should not be easy to take on low server population times everyone has to sleep but if i where in my keep id hear the bombs flying.
Originally posted by zekuel if you could choose 1-5 players in your guild depending on level of guild to act as npc to defend your keep while offline. you could set up a predefined-AI for your npc and commander.
I absolutely love those ideas.
I healed Mistwraith and all I got was this stupid tee-shirt!
Originally posted by zekuel guild housing can only be put up in keeps. along with rewards for keeps like relics in daoc. your guild houses and merchants to sell items can only go up in keeps; your guild housing lot. there could be a limited number of housing lots. eventually you'll even need to put them up in other realm keeps. it would be nice to have guild xp and rewards but limit guild numbers. if you leave a guild you take your guild xp with you to your new guild. anyways i thought it would be cool if you could use your guild xp to build and level up your keep captain/commander and also if you could choose 1-5 players in your guild depending on level of guild to act as npc to defend your keep while offline. you could set up a predefined-AI for your npc and commander. keeps should not be easy to take on low server population times everyone has to sleep but if i where in my keep id hear the bombs flying.
To kind of piggyback on this.
Maybe Keeps would reflect the guilds that claim them. Guild houses would be in the safe area, but when they take a keep, in any realm, the services/lots/merchants inside start at a level based on the guild. So, if a small guild claims a keep, the keep would start out smaller/weaker than if a powerful guild took it, and take longer to build up, harder for crafters to get the walls up, etc. A bigger guild might start out with more resources or a bigger variety of possibilities for development.
Now, by owning a keep, the merchants and whatever capabilities the guild house contains, can be moved to the keep. They would actually have to travel to get there, and maybe bigger stronger guilds would have bigger, stronger, faster travelling merchant caravans. A guild could decide to move whatever resources or merchant types it wanted, sending them as one group or smaller groups at a time of their choosing. Maybe moving a siege merchant to their frontier keep grants a 50% bonus to siege building, or they could move a crafting merchant to a keep near a certain resource, which would then allow their crafters new bonuses only available at that location.
The caravan would start at an entrance to the safe housing zone, with a few different choices available. If they're escorted by a group, they could follow the live players. If they are put on "Auto Travel" they'd follow the dirt paths or built-up roads to the keeps, maybe with a few different routes to each keep for variety. Obviously, they'd move faster on developed roads, which would give realms a reason to develop them. While they're travelling to the keep, guild resources would be vulnerable.
So if they want to risk it for bonuses, they can move stuff to PvP areas. However, while there, if the keep is taken, the merchants are lost for a period of time,maybe a couple days, maybe a week. The guild would lose the privilege of having them until they respawn in the safe housing area.
Maybe you could even do a meta-rating for the guild, and have the computer determine what kind of bonus a claimed keep might generate. If you have a big guild with a lot of different members and classes and RP's earned from various methods, you'd get a well-rounded keep with spaces for developing a lot of different things. A small guild who earned the majority of it's RPs from it's one healer, might spawn more healer guards than armsman or assassins. If a guild has several notable Shield Crafters in it, maybe anyone who crafts shields in that keep skills up a little better or the walls and/or doors have extra reinforcements .
The keep could reflect the guild in a number of ways, first by the relative beginning size, then by what merchants/amenities might be moved there, and maybe special random NPC's would spawn there based on the meta-rating of the guild and other variables in the game at the time.
This is the kind of thing that would have to be tested vigorously, for sure, as you can definitely see areas of exploit, realm in-fighting, and the possibility of the rich getting richer, but this type of stuff would add a lot of variety and strategy, and maybe realm conversation for planning and plotting.
I was never a huge fan of the relic system, or any system that provides a realm wide xp/atk/defense/magic bonus for taking a keep. Doesn't make any sense and only rewards the stronger side, allowing for potential imbalances.
I'd much prefer that keeps have other value that makes them worth taking and defending. Something that negates any incentive to flip keeps over and over. There should be ZERO incentive for realms to ever work with each other or arrange keep swapping, to be consistent with Mark's principle #10 - or realm pride.
So, here are my thoughts on what keeps could offer:
1. Control of a certain region of the map.
2. Within the region of the map you control, you have exclusive access to the resources and city plots in that realm.
3. Only the realm that controls the area can generate resources from the buildings built on the city plots and resource "nodes" (e.g. farms, forest groves, mines, etc) in that area. This would include certain "rare" resource nodes, one or two of which might exist in the whole world, making each "region" have a strategic value to the war effort. Which resources does your realm prioritize? Aim for those keeps and hold onto them.
4. When you lose a keep, the buildings you have built on the city plots are either degraded or destroyed. Not sure what the best mechanism would be to minimize the incentive to keep swap while also giving you incentive to build up those buildings. I probably prefer the "destroyed" idea simply because it will drain resources and make it more valuable to hang onto keeps you've taken. It also will make it more likely that the cities in your most protected regions will be the most built up (which makes sense) and that the cities on the front-line are less likely to be built up and making logistics more realistic in the sense that you probably won't be able to build the best items on the warfront and make them immediately available to the troops.
5. Alternatively, you could have certain buildings that only degrade and others that are destroyed (e.g., a portal that a realm can build in a city [not in a keep] that allows players to spend a certain amount of resources or gold to teleport from one portal to another]). The portal would definitely be destroyed because it is a magic construct requiring the keep's energy to remain active. You could use a similar line of logic for other unique/special buildings as opposed to buildings like a crafter's hall.
6. You also get exclusive access to certain dungeons within your area of control, which can be hunted for resources and rare components for crafters to use in building advanced armor and weapons. You also can find rare components for scribes who are the ones who craft the scrolls for casters to memorize new spells. So certain rare spells will require access to components that are in dungeons that require you to control some of the most contested keeps. You want to hang onto those dungeons not only for your own benefit, but also to keep the other side from getting access to those components.
Give rewards for owning keeps, not for taking them.
Have an alert system in place so that keep owners (owning realm perhaps, or owning guild) are informed when a keep is under attack or if there is enemy activity near by.
Comments
I agree with the concept.
I think it's better to be rewarded for HAVING a structure than to be rewarded for taking it.
If every structure you had made you do 2% more damage (or whatever, some sort of boon for having it), it'd be important not to just to try to get structures, but to keep the ones you have too.
Gish, did you really call wow a "pvp centered game"?
LOL, no kidding, but he did say "failure of" with that. I always felt WoW could have been soooo much more, especially given its IP (building a kingdom to fight an enemy kingdom).
I'm hoping CU will be what WoW should have been. Players in the roles of the armies you controlled in Warcraft. Players build the keeps, towns, and paths between, a lot like a persistant RTS game. I like a lot of the ideas on here. I pray that the ideas expressed by Plastic-Metal, Stiler, and Gish can all be incorporated.
Make the safe area tiny with only the basic things player society needs to work. Let the players build the good stuff in the towns they create. Buildings that give bonuses to crafting, and the items crafted in them, with the ablity of being upgraded as long as the player's realm controls the town. Make it so that everything can be destroyed, but only the keep needs to be captured by the enemy to change possession of the whole town. The town can be added to only by the realm in control. The guild that controls the keep gets a tax from the players who own buildings in the town. The tax is variable based on realm, so that the guild can reward players of its own realm with lower taxes, while making life harder on players of the other realms who built here when their realm controlled the keep. But that is the price they pay for the attacking realm to not destroy the buildings outright.
Why would players from a far away realm build in an area that is likely to be controlled by another realm most of the time and possibly be destroyed? Because it is the ONLY area with a particular material needed for high end items! And if your realm is ever to get access to those materials, you will have to take this place at some point.
How Realm, Class and Server pride will be fueled by asymmetrical class design.
Here we have ingame footage of combat between TDD and Viking Knights leading into Viking versus Briton Knights. Note how the asymmetry has created so much pride for the Briton.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjEcj8KpuJw
I actually said the worst example of a PvP centered game...though, in looking back, I can see how the phrasing was misunderstood. The point was the WoW is nearly the antithesis of a PvP game, it had literally no PvP features at launch other than a few PvP servers and the ability to attack the opposing factions NPCs. However, in an environment devoid of "PvP features" it probably had more active and enjoyable PvP moments than most of the games being touted as PvP games today. Now that wasn't because the game had great PvP, lol. All of the great PvP memories players had from that time were forged on their own, because the game both allowed it, but also retained the "safety" so that players that were new to the experience, or nervous about joining it, weren't forced to or held back for it.
The point is, the best PvP moments I've ever had in a game had literally NOTHING to do with PvP mechanics or systems beyond the ability to stab someone and novel moments that enabled it to occur. I had more fun hunting a Paladin through the jungle because he killed my friends than I did playing the "PvP games" in most of the releases today. The best part of that story was that one of my friends had actually given me gold to help with a few quests (I didn't ask, but certainly didn't turn it down since vanilla mounts ate a wallet). In the process of helping him I killed about 6 people, for the lulz, as it were. I had just as much fun trying to escape the lot of them once they all teamed up to take me down.
The joy of that had nothing to do with a reward system. I did not earn gear or levels for it, if anything doing it kept me from doing the things that WOULD have rewarded me. We place too much concern on rewarding people for PvP. Its only meaningful when the PvP is the reward. It only happens when there is loss, though the loss needs to be something you can deal with. For WoW, the loss was constantly having to do ghost runs and getting shorted on your questing time. Not a big deal, but an annoyance that spawned plenty of fun times. Without ANY loss, and only rewards, PvP is just another loot machine and is ignored once the right toy pops out.
You stay sassy!
Mythic/EA trademarked RvR? Lol. I would still call it rvr in game even if it was trademarked because that is just silly.
RvRvR is really what it is but.. yeah.
Bige - Bors.
Bigge, Zmallz, Reiggn, Faty)
(Everquest(99-02), Lineage(01-02), DAoC(02-09), WoW(07), WAR(10-11), Rift(11)
Nothing Current.
I absolutely love those ideas.
I healed Mistwraith and all I got was this stupid tee-shirt!
To kind of piggyback on this.
Maybe Keeps would reflect the guilds that claim them. Guild houses would be in the safe area, but when they take a keep, in any realm, the services/lots/merchants inside start at a level based on the guild. So, if a small guild claims a keep, the keep would start out smaller/weaker than if a powerful guild took it, and take longer to build up, harder for crafters to get the walls up, etc. A bigger guild might start out with more resources or a bigger variety of possibilities for development.
Now, by owning a keep, the merchants and whatever capabilities the guild house contains, can be moved to the keep. They would actually have to travel to get there, and maybe bigger stronger guilds would have bigger, stronger, faster travelling merchant caravans. A guild could decide to move whatever resources or merchant types it wanted, sending them as one group or smaller groups at a time of their choosing. Maybe moving a siege merchant to their frontier keep grants a 50% bonus to siege building, or they could move a crafting merchant to a keep near a certain resource, which would then allow their crafters new bonuses only available at that location.
The caravan would start at an entrance to the safe housing zone, with a few different choices available. If they're escorted by a group, they could follow the live players. If they are put on "Auto Travel" they'd follow the dirt paths or built-up roads to the keeps, maybe with a few different routes to each keep for variety. Obviously, they'd move faster on developed roads, which would give realms a reason to develop them. While they're travelling to the keep, guild resources would be vulnerable.
So if they want to risk it for bonuses, they can move stuff to PvP areas. However, while there, if the keep is taken, the merchants are lost for a period of time,maybe a couple days, maybe a week. The guild would lose the privilege of having them until they respawn in the safe housing area.
Maybe you could even do a meta-rating for the guild, and have the computer determine what kind of bonus a claimed keep might generate. If you have a big guild with a lot of different members and classes and RP's earned from various methods, you'd get a well-rounded keep with spaces for developing a lot of different things. A small guild who earned the majority of it's RPs from it's one healer, might spawn more healer guards than armsman or assassins. If a guild has several notable Shield Crafters in it, maybe anyone who crafts shields in that keep skills up a little better or the walls and/or doors have extra reinforcements .
The keep could reflect the guild in a number of ways, first by the relative beginning size, then by what merchants/amenities might be moved there, and maybe special random NPC's would spawn there based on the meta-rating of the guild and other variables in the game at the time.
This is the kind of thing that would have to be tested vigorously, for sure, as you can definitely see areas of exploit, realm in-fighting, and the possibility of the rich getting richer, but this type of stuff would add a lot of variety and strategy, and maybe realm conversation for planning and plotting.
I was never a huge fan of the relic system, or any system that provides a realm wide xp/atk/defense/magic bonus for taking a keep. Doesn't make any sense and only rewards the stronger side, allowing for potential imbalances.
I'd much prefer that keeps have other value that makes them worth taking and defending. Something that negates any incentive to flip keeps over and over. There should be ZERO incentive for realms to ever work with each other or arrange keep swapping, to be consistent with Mark's principle #10 - or realm pride.
So, here are my thoughts on what keeps could offer:
1. Control of a certain region of the map.
2. Within the region of the map you control, you have exclusive access to the resources and city plots in that realm.
3. Only the realm that controls the area can generate resources from the buildings built on the city plots and resource "nodes" (e.g. farms, forest groves, mines, etc) in that area. This would include certain "rare" resource nodes, one or two of which might exist in the whole world, making each "region" have a strategic value to the war effort. Which resources does your realm prioritize? Aim for those keeps and hold onto them.
4. When you lose a keep, the buildings you have built on the city plots are either degraded or destroyed. Not sure what the best mechanism would be to minimize the incentive to keep swap while also giving you incentive to build up those buildings. I probably prefer the "destroyed" idea simply because it will drain resources and make it more valuable to hang onto keeps you've taken. It also will make it more likely that the cities in your most protected regions will be the most built up (which makes sense) and that the cities on the front-line are less likely to be built up and making logistics more realistic in the sense that you probably won't be able to build the best items on the warfront and make them immediately available to the troops.
5. Alternatively, you could have certain buildings that only degrade and others that are destroyed (e.g., a portal that a realm can build in a city [not in a keep] that allows players to spend a certain amount of resources or gold to teleport from one portal to another]). The portal would definitely be destroyed because it is a magic construct requiring the keep's energy to remain active. You could use a similar line of logic for other unique/special buildings as opposed to buildings like a crafter's hall.
6. You also get exclusive access to certain dungeons within your area of control, which can be hunted for resources and rare components for crafters to use in building advanced armor and weapons. You also can find rare components for scribes who are the ones who craft the scrolls for casters to memorize new spells. So certain rare spells will require access to components that are in dungeons that require you to control some of the most contested keeps. You want to hang onto those dungeons not only for your own benefit, but also to keep the other side from getting access to those components.
Give rewards for owning keeps, not for taking them.
Have an alert system in place so that keep owners (owning realm perhaps, or owning guild) are informed when a keep is under attack or if there is enemy activity near by.