Let's talk about a hypothetical game.

[Barm McLir]

[veeshanMurtak]

[Scowls]

[Tobyus]

[Barm McLir]

[GheffGutterbrains]

[haxot]

[Jaraman]

[Jaraman]

[Jaraman]

[Jaraman]

[Brohg]

[Unmei]

[AtommWarbird]

[Jaraman]

[Brohg]

[Jaraman]

[Barm McLir]

An army, great in space, may offer opposition in a brief span of time.
One man, brief in space, must spread his opposition across a period of
many years if he is to have a chance of succeeding.

-Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light


I definately think the level thing got way out of control. A level 70 warrior can walk around with about 500 times the hitpoints of a level 1. How do you balance that? Old content becomes a bic lighter.

One nice thing about SWG was you could hand any new player a laser rifle and let him tag along. I think if I was designing an MMORPG, the levels would cap out around 15 or 20, each a hell level compared to the last -- and a level 10 would be half as formidable as 20.

[Karshak_rn]

[Unmei]

[Jaraman]

[Beafly]

I would spend some time looking very hard at content generation. The thing that has seperated EQ from the rest of the games I've tried is that I have yet to run out of things to do. When I do, I'll probably be looking elsewhere too. Develop an engine that can present immersive, challenging, properly rewarded content on the fly and you'll have a game like no other. A game with literally no end.

[Gonlok]

Beafly, did you ever play Daggerfall?

[Brohg]

[XeroOmega]

leveling is an integral part of almost ALL RPGs. I heard about an RPG that tried to do away with leveling, super monsters, gear levels and the like.

it sounded about as entertaining as playing as a student in an advanced calculus class at the local highschool.

like it or not, the "realism" or the "immersiveness" of games strongly depend on the fact that some individual characters be stronger than others. that there be some goal of "improvement" that characters can consistantly reach.

Murtak got things pretty square on his post, and other problems like "training" can easily be dealt with through modifications of the game's AI.

I do not think instancing is a bad thing at all. it is a WONDERFUL thing when you're with a raiding organization. however I DO believe that EQ has depended too strongly on zone-instancing in more recent expansions. I feel there should be a small bit of competition/cooperation of groups in certain zones, in example Wall of Slaughter, where people have camps, compete openly for fielded mobs, and occasionally band together to kill a large mob (example: Shadowhunter, though I think he and warfiend should have their see-invis flag taken away)

[veeshanMurtak]

[Beafly]

[Barm McLir]

[XeroOmega]

[Warren Magnuson Emarr]

First issue that needs to addressed is community policing and anti-griefing. As much as people claim they are against instancing and how much fun it was to race to a mob and kill it before your rivals got to it, it was usually only fun once you were the one that came out on top. Issues of kill stealing and camping and training..... non-PVP EQ didn't have the worst of the griefing (corpse camping, bind point camping) as other PVP games did (ultima online, PVP EQ) but these issues drove everyone from players to GM's to distraction.

The primary problem with creating a persistent MMORPG world is lack of real world consequences for people who break rules that normally shouldn't or couldn't be broken without severe repercussions. And for those people that claim that griefing add fun to the game, compare the number of people who play DAOC, PVP-EQ, Shadowbane with the number of people that play Everquest. The numbers aren't even remotely close. Even games that are designed for PVP are eclipsed by games without. Without a functioning crime, law and punishment system, griefers will simply drive away players (customers) which is bad for business. The key is not to create a game that caters to everyone, but to try to satisfy the majority.

Other issues that need to be addressed is, variety, also known as Content. People get bored of the same thing over and over again. Everything should be added, nothing should be ignored, the more things there are for people to do, the better.
-Quests
-Tradeskilling and Trading
-Fighting/Adventuring
-Roleplaying

In each of these categories, there should be a number of different ways to achieve them and each should have their own form of built in rewards. All of these games can be broken down into a simple equation of time and resource management. People ALWAYS want to feel like they are progressing towards something and their character should not be left behind. One of the biggest stumbling blocks to roleplaying was, if you roleplayed, your character stagnated while your friends were levelling much faster and beyond your ability to continue to adventure with them.

Time spent = rewards gained or lost. For most people, levelling was the ideal tracker for this sort of thing, it was the most direct measure of how powerful your character was or could be. People didn't want to spend time tradeskilling, trading, questing or roleplaying for insufficient rewards. For a game to be successful in all venues, rewards must be raised across the bar to equal that of fighting/levelling which is universally the most time efficient means of gaining power and gaining gear. A note about adventuring and combats... you need to have a good to awesome AI and ways to make combat interesting, evolving without making it reducable to a macro and without making it a twitch reflex game.




While there are specific ideas on how to solve or resolve each issue facing a new game on the market, I'm getting hungry so this will have to be it for now...



Regards,
Warren

[Warren Magnuson Emarr]

While I'm munching on pizza, a note regarding high level people vs low level PVP....



It's an idea I've toyed with and the inspiration to solve the problem came from an issue of Knights of the Dinner Table. Irony considering KoDT tends to satirize gaming a lot.

Anyways... if a high level person goes into a newbie area and essentially starts griefing in that area... you could put in a mobbing code. For each person in a mob, they give each other person a bonus to hit and damage the offender. And meanwhile if you want to be exceptionally mean, you can reduce the fighting effectiveness of the high level person for each person in the mob reflecting the fact that the mob is holding the high level person down. You can also distribute the damage dealt evenly to all members of the mob, making it less likely that any one person dies, weakening the mob.

In short, each player in a mob will raise the effective level of everyone else participating. This would be how small communities become able to repel or defend themselves from stronger opponents. It reflects how armies can fell powerful heroes, how there is strength in numbers.

[Brohg]

That sort of code would work to encourage PvE grouping vs challenging content, as well. I like that idea.

[Barm McLir]