I was thinking how flexible the MMO genre was the other day, who says we have to have NPC's that respawn? Who says we have to have level based combat? Who says we have to have unrealistic inventories in which a two handed sword is as big an imps horn?

The deeper I thought the more enthralled I became by these brilliant ideas coming to me seemingly out of nowhere. Why not have a game where you are a member of a race of imperialists, fighting for more land, once you've completed epically long dungeons it's yours to rebuild. Why not have NPC's stay dead? Their corpses riddled all over the ground, moving them to piles so that they can be burned with the rest of our enemies.

How would you get around the apparent conceptual flaws? Easy! Make the land massive, the dungeons and quests cryptic and the progression ability based.

In my game you wouldn't gain the upper hand by having better gear, no, you would have the upper hand by having a more flexible way of playing. The more quests you complete, the more experience you gain the more abilities you get. While lowbies have the barebones to beating people, more seasoned players would have more abilities, abilities that aren't nexesarilly stronger, but abilites that can be used based on the players specific playstyle.

Just so you know there are a couple of sport MMO's out there and 1 incredibly successful racing one which I can't for the life of me remember the name of but it has a huge number of subscribers, and also is one of the first MMO's to charge real money for in-game upgrades.

http://www.shot-online.com/ is the sport MMO

Malal

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Original post by Malal Just so you know there are a couple of sport MMO's out there and 1 incredibly successful racing one which I can't for the life of me remember the name of but it has a huge number of subscribers, and also is one of the first MMO's to charge real money for in-game upgrades. http://www.shot-online.com/ is the sport MMO Malal

you can't say that is a kind of MMO
golf or any other sports doesn't allow over thousand people to play together at same place.

I've actually had an idea for a while for a game in which EVERYTHING obeys the laws of physics (to make it fun, the laws of physics might have to be altered a bit). A player would start the game with a very small number of items that they could choose from a list, or possibly they would start with only the clothes on their back. Anything other than these starting items would have to be crafted by someone (be they npc or player). To craft an item, you would have to craft it the way you would in real life (ie if you want a sword, you would actually have to beat some red-hot metal with another object until it was the shape of a sword, then find a stone and sharpen it). Once you crafted an item once, you could tell the game to remember how you made it, and then recall that later and have a sword made while you go make a sandwich. Each time you make an item, you get progressively faster at it (approaching a limit, of course). This same concept would be applied to fighting monsters (first time, indicate the specific part of the monster to stab at, then have that saved as a repeatable attack). Of course there would be NPC's that you could pay to learn this stuff from, rather than define it yourself. You could also teach other players what you know, and charge them for it if you like. The NPC's would preferably have limited knowledge of their subject, and have the real masters be players. Hopefully if you got enough players, you would start to see a community collaboration for inventing things (if everything truly obeyed the laws of physics, it would only be a matter of time before someone found the ingredients for gunpowder, and someone figured out how to smelt a cannon, and so on). The only problem would be making it so things didn't take as long to do as they do in the real world. Nobody would play a game where they have to wait a week for a smith to make them a sword.

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Original post by evanrogers I see a potential problem with a peer to peer MMO that would make it more restricted than a centralized MMO. What if parts of the game are changing, but persistent, and not bound to a single character? Like in-game housing, or an auction house. Where would that data be stored? If everyone stores the entire world, they would need to be notified of every change, and that seems unrealistic. If only a few store part of the world, then when they go offline that part of the world would be unavailable.

One machine wouldn't act as a server -- clusters of machines would act as servers. The chance that all of the cluster would go offline at once is pretty low -- and as members of the cluster went offline, other computers would be pulled into the cluster (and given the local game state, like player housing and the like).

The "host" of the game might want to have to have some machines availiable. So if the number of players online dropped below a critical threshold, the host's machines would kick in and help.

This doesn't make everything peer to peer. The game rules, character files, and the like would have a "canonical" host -- possibly they would be delegated out to cluster machines to pass on down to clients.

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I suppose there could be some dedicated servers for this, but that's moving away from the peer to peer concept.

There may be a central server that stores "canonical" versions of the world for backup purposes. Or ... most items that you want to persist (like houses) are attached to characters. If you had a character server of some kind, the "important" persistant data could be stored there.

Bittorrent, as an example, is a peer-to-peer program that uses servers to connect the peers to each other. The server also tells the clients how to validate the data (with checksums) so you don't connect to a hostile peer who feeds you bad data.

Both the MMOFPS and MMORTS genres could use with some loving.

At last check, WWII Online still had about 10,000 subscribers and Planetside is still in the 50,000 range (mmogchart.com)

Time of Defiance is the one of the few true MMORTS games out there. There are a few others (3 maybe) that still have subscribers.

I think the MMOFPS is server capability limited as there has to be a way to segrate the masses. Planetside locks the various game zones/worlds when there is too many people. I would hope/expect to see some MMOFPS in the coming years, if the developers can optimize the servers to handle masses of people in a zone. There is a server side card in development by AIseek to assist with this. Hopefully they are successful.

With respect to MMORTS, you are beginning to see the start of RTS elements within MMORGPs with teams/clans taking and holding zones or points of interest.
Again, the server technology has to catch-up or the developers have come up with a solution to the traditional end-game of a RTS game (winning the whole map)because the losers still need a location to spawn to.