I can just envisage it now

Scene: The lab of Mutobrain the evil genious. A hostage is locked in a store cupboard

Enter stage left Captain Wonderful, having just defeated Mutobrain. Cap uses his x-ray vision and sees the hostage locked in the cupboard. He walks over and rips the door off its hinges.

Cap: Fear not citizen I am hear to save you. Hold my hand [press H] and I will fly you to safety.
Hostage: Hmmm nah don't think so.
Cap: Errr what dude?
Hostage: So how much XP you gonna get for this quest?
Cap: Citizen, time is wasting and there are other poor souls to save. Take my hand [press H] and lets be on our way back to Metropoville.
Hostage: XP mate... how much XP you getting.
Cap: Errr 800 or so I guess, why?
Hostage: Well that's gotta be worth 100 gold in anyones book so how about you give me 50.
Cap: What? Look I am here to rescue you. Your a non-paying punter. You get free access cos you don't pay but in return you gotta be a citizen and get kidnapped and stuff.
Hostage: 55 then
Cap: Huh? Dude you just said 50
Hostage: 60.... keep on talking spandex man
Cap: Listen I ain't paying you do do what your supposed to be doing anyway.
Hostage: Your call mate. Kiss your XP goodnight....

[The Hostage has left the game]

The solution to poor NPCs is not to replace them with the lowest order of players who have made zero committment to the game (either financially or in building a character). The solution is to develop better NPCs or to hire staffers who are paid to play these roles.

I thank all of you for your suggestions and input. That is the main reason I post here to have my ideas tossed about by any one with more knowlege in this field than I have, (which is pretty much all of you) Again this makes for a great learning experiance for me. Now my biggest problem I can see so far is, I see the glass as half full, but most of you see the glass as half empty. So thanks to your posts I now see why this idea would not work....The player factor! For some reason my mind just did not visualize the abuse that none paying characters could do with this system.
So how can something like this be fixed. For any one that has played CoH's and seen the NPC's getting mugged and such on the streets over and over again, what would be a good way to make this more realistic. Yes I have thought about, if the game ever comes to reality, having real people hired on staff to run most of the major NPC's, this way they could hand out custom quests to players that no other player could get. But just the average NPC walking the street would it be possible to give them enough AI to make them react more realisticly in said mugging scenario? And if so, why hasn't any one integrated such an AI into existing MMORPG's. Again thank you for the posts, it is nice to be able to discuss my ideas with others.

Look at Star Wars Galaxies. The economy was completely player driven, and I loved that. At least when the mature players played. Once most of them left and the little kids took over, inflation was huge. Between that and jedi holo griding there was so much crap on the market, for way too much (don't ask me how it really worked that way). Very few respectable artisans made what players needed, and certain items were very hard to find.

Then they released their combat upgrade. I wasn't the biggest fan of it, but it wasn't too bad. Except the bugs in the code. haha. Anyways, they screwed the artisan classes over since they could no longer get to their resource harvester locations without a bodyguard of some type to protect them (the game became level based over skill based). Then bodyguards started charging large amounts of money so that artisans could get their own resources and craft. Now it seems that prices would have gone up (I quit right after CU), but I have also heard that most artisans are now gone from the game. And since SWG relies on players to craft, there could be trouble.

The closest thing to a totally PC run game I've played is Achaea. NPCS are only for quests or as guards in cities. Player run politics, player gods, player councils, shops, clans, factions etc and player run cities.

I had a similar idea some years ago. But later I've come to the conclusion that a game run by partitioners would require the developers the leave the "traditional" (evercrack derivatives, that is) design of mmorpgs.

I believe for that to work, the first thing that has to go is the level-grind and xp-farming philosophy. I also believe that such a world would have far better chances of working if the "massive" was dropped and instead be designed around communities of say, 50-150 players.

My reasoning for this is that for a player-driven world to function, there has to be a major element of cooperation and community interaction in order to keep things working and the evercrack design imho goes against this. Further more, you have a bigger chance of finding a place in a community if it's considerably smaller than the current implementations that got several thousands of concurrent players.

Of course, everyhing imho.

Quote:

Original post by Luctus I also believe that such a world would have far better chances of working if the "massive" was dropped and instead be designed around communities of say, 50-150 players.

This is true and I have thought of going this route, but what if you could create a playing universe big enough to do the same thing but in an opposite way. What I mean is if you have many worlds and towns and cities, plus time zones and different dimensions then players could be spaced out in a way that would make it seem like there was only a few on at any given place. Take CoH's for an example if you had many worlds with 100's of cities then you would have heros scattered through out the cities so you would not have to worry about to many in one city....Theoretically.

Now I do not know if it is possible to create and maintain such a large scale project with todays technology, but I am in no rush cause I have a lot to learn first before I would try to tackle said project. But if you could make a playing environment so large that players could also spend more time exploring rather than just trying to advance in lvl's and such, find a way to make the exploring just as rewarding as fighting, then I think this could work.

What do you all think?

Quote:

Original post by Lonewolf Darkmoon This is true and I have thought of going this route, but what if you could create a playing universe big enough to do the same thing but in an opposite way. What I mean is if you have many worlds and towns and cities, plus time zones and different dimensions then players could be spaced out in a way that would make it seem like there was only a few on at any given place. Take CoH's for an example if you had many worlds with 100's of cities then you would have heros scattered through out the cities so you would not have to worry about to many in one city....Theoretically.

Indeed, this would be a viable approach. Gently pushing players into small groups with the option of interacting with whomever they want is a much better idea than just lumping a couple of thousand players together. If you look at your own society, you'll probably find that you in fact interact with a very small group of other people. Designing a game to mimic this is probably A Good Thing(tm).

Incidently, it's the way EVE online works. While they have a really large amount of players in the same world, their universe is so huge that you rarely see more than 5-10 other players, and commonly not even that, at any station in the game. Of course, their design encourages players to spread out over their whole universe which might not be the case for a "ground based" mmo.

Also, EVE consists of only space and stations which makes it cheap in the content creation department. Creating an equally large world in a medieval or equivalent setting would take a humongous amount of effort to create all the required content to fill it out with.

On the bright side though, with the playerbase spread out over a large ingame area, it makes it much easier to distribute the load over several servers since a large portion of the population won't have the need to interact with each other.