@Rian - If you read the whole post you'll see that you need money to build a dungeon, money that is acquired by playing the game if you don't have a dungeon of your own.

Ahh, now i see. Sorry about that.

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Original post by trapdoor [...]Oh! Games will also have world unique items. These items are ultimately powerful. Imagine 1 guy taking out 10 with ease. These items are unique so there is a set number of available in the world. Having one of these comes at a price; world unique items are lootable off your body or where you store them, while other good items are not. Since you can't exactly be in the game at all times, the item goes into your dungeon, or if you don't have one, just on your body (which is extremely easy to loot). The harder your dungeon is, the better chance you have of keeping your uber item. This would DEFINITELY create some motivation for dungeon exploring.

You're almost on the right track. Drop the epic/unique/etc, but keep the "dungeons are banks" idea. Make the game semi-realistic in that there are no "secure banks" at all, and everything must be stored in play-built areas. A dungeon isn't a mission so much as it's a secure storage facility =-) For those that have dungeons, their stuff is kep at the end of their dungeon when they're not logged on and when they are logged on, anything not on the character is in the dungeon. For those that don't have dungeons, they can select another player to safeguard their stuff (or perhaps put it in a decent NPC dungeon) and hope it's there when they get back. Perhaps you should do levels, but have them be meaningless as far as 'power level' goes, but they could still be used to judge a character because a higher level character has been playing longer and likely has better equipment (unless they put it all in one place and it was taken) and you could have a rule where level X players can't take stuff from level <X-10 players, so newbies don't have a chance to build up a bit before the "this game world is my life" players take everything. It'd also be interesting if, instead of a huge chest at the end or monsters randomly dropping things, there would be a few monsters at the end that would actually use the items you're trying to take (so taking a good item is more difficult simply because it's a better item and makes the monster stronger).

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Original post by Extrarius You're almost on the right track. Drop the epic/unique/etc, but keep the "dungeons are banks" idea. Make the game semi-realistic in that there are no "secure banks" at all, and everything must be stored in play-built areas. A dungeon isn't a mission so much as it's a secure storage facility =-) For those that have dungeons, their stuff is kep at the end of their dungeon when they're not logged on and when they are logged on, anything not on the character is in the dungeon. For those that don't have dungeons, they can select another player to safeguard their stuff (or perhaps put it in a decent NPC dungeon) and hope it's there when they get back. Perhaps you should do levels, but have them be meaningless as far as 'power level' goes, but they could still be used to judge a character because a higher level character has been playing longer and likely has better equipment (unless they put it all in one place and it was taken) and you could have a rule where level X players can't take stuff from level <X-10 players, so newbies don't have a chance to build up a bit before the "this game world is my life" players take everything. It'd also be interesting if, instead of a huge chest at the end or monsters randomly dropping things, there would be a few monsters at the end that would actually use the items you're trying to take (so taking a good item is more difficult simply because it's a better item and makes the monster stronger).

Following this route, you shouldn't have the first player to get through the dungeon takes all the loot, or will it be that you can only take select amount of items plus 25% of the gold? And what if a guild was formed, that all they do is run from dungeon to dungeon wiping out everything but fellow guild members? Perhaps have it so player crafted dungeons can only be solo'ed or at the most allow only three looters at a time. Maybe there should be the option of keeping one item unlootable, so a player wouldn't be completely wrecked and would still have his best weapon or armor. Otherwise, if you are hit by looters you would be out of weapons and armor, with no money to buy more and you would need to fight weaker monsters by hand until you have enough money to buy a good item. You certainly couldn't run through another player's dungeon without a weapon, and all tanks would be destroyed by a looting, while all casters wouldn't be affected too much.

I disagree with the "all your possessions should be kept in a the dungeon". This seems really radical, and poses several problems:

• It royally screws over low-level players, and requires you to hack together some kind of "safety" system to help them out. This is a sign of bad game design, IMO.
  
  
• What happens when you reach the end of a dungeon? Do you take all of the loot? If so, what's left for the next adventurer?

I think, to balance it, there should be some kind of "safe" bank where you can store gold at least. To benefit new players, you could have a cap on the bank as to how much gold they can put in there, so that eventually, yeah, you'd have to start storing it in a dungeon. But not until you're well-established. I still disagree with this kind of "must store in dungeon" system, since it basically kills any possible reward queueing system so the dungeon can be defeated multiple times before being "restocked".

Another problem with the bank system is that everyone would put all of their money into the bank before adventuring. Thus negating any possible loss. Which kills the "profit" aspect of the game. Sure, you can charge "entry fees" for the dungeons, but O____O. I wouldn't pay to venture into the abyss.

Sure, you can design around these to include some kind of safe storage system, but inevitably, there will probably be some method to exploit it such that losses are minimized. Which makes it so there's only one strategy, which kind of sucks.

I dunno, I have mixed feelings about it in any case. But it definitely is an area which needs to be addressed.

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Original post by Servant of the Lord [...]Following this route, you shouldn't have the first player to get through the dungeon takes all the loot[...]

Correct. My thoughts were that dungeons should be instanced for small parties (say 10 ppl max, though a limit like 4 would be better for me) and only X% (by gold value) of the items in a dungeon would be available per group (and it would store a groups' progress for X minutes after the group leaves, with every Y minutes some of the monsters reappearing so you can't come back at the end of the time period and be exactly where you left off), but in addition their would be some 'free' (to the DM) rewards that would be far below the challenge level (ie level 30 monsters giving level 15 items/gold/etc for 'free) since there has to be a source for money if there is a money sink (presuming things sell for less than full value, so buying then selling to NPCs results in money dissapearing from the world).

Mushu: I think a safe bank causes more complications than it solves. You could, perhaps, have a VERY limited bank that can store a single item (or, if diablo-style, perhaps 8 'squares' of items) along with a bit of gold (maybe 5000 if prices are along diablo 1 levels), but anything that would help out more serious players at all would detract significantly from the dungeon focus of the game.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster [...]If you arent aiming for an open-ended game then its not as big a problem. Players will always accumulate interesting items and extra equiptment (especially in a 'rich' detail world). If you dont have something like the invulnurable bank for items, you would lose out on ALOT of player gameplay. A severely limited storage would hamstring the game (ie- kiss crafting goodbye, kiss unique/varied weapons/tools/loot goodbye). If you try to have a house (or equiv) where the assets that a player accumulates are left open to predations of other players you will eventually need a lockdown scheme (like used in UO) which is a bigger drain on the server (effectively it is a visible bank).

If you go with the idea that monsters in a dungeon actually use the items they defend, then awesome items would be sought after not only to have for yourself but also for your minions. You could have a few well-equipped very strong monsters guarding your prized possions behind a hidden passageway (that you have to use a skill to find and open, or maybe you just need to locate the switch on one side of the dungeon and then go back to the other to find the door, etc), while more reasonable monsters are in an obvious area to challenge other players and give rewards to the winners. There are many possibilities that could work, such as having 'guild dungeons' that multiple people could contribute to in order to safeguard their stuff, essentially being a player-run realistic bank.

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Original post by Extrarius There are many possibilities that could work, such as having 'guild dungeons' that multiple people could contribute to in order to safeguard their stuff, essentially being a player-run realistic bank.

I think that when you log, your equipment that is actaully on you and not just in your inventory should not go into a dungeon, that way if someone does loot your particular dungeon, you wouldn't be completely ruined. All of your inventory gets added into your bank-dungeon at log, but your equipment on you wouldn't, upon relog your inventory(or what's left of it, if any) would return to you. What you actaully place in your dungeon would stay there until removed by you or a looter.

I like the idea of a guild dungeon though, where every guild member helps build it/upgrade it. In everquest, there was this guild called the "Western Trading Guild" or something simular, and it was consisted of high end merchants. Maybe in this hypothetical MMO, Banking Guilds will form that spend lots of money to mantian dungeons, which charge other players fees to store their goods in the Banking Guild's dungeon. Of course, that will, in turn, create fake banking guilds. Insurance will be created by a legit Banking Guild for if someone loots your items from their vault; this may(nay, will) bring insurance scams, where someone buys insurance on tons of high end items, and has a friend loot them, splitting the insurance and returning the goods to the original owner for placement in a different bank. Heh, many 'shady' busineses will spring up, bringing more imersion into the game, more role playing, more annoyances but overall allowing people to go more in-depth. And with the creation of banking guilds, perhaps loaner guilds? If you don't pay a loaner 110% of what you borrowed to purchase your cool item, the whole guild will go and loot your dungeon clean, and keep looting it until you pay what you owe. Someone may take advantage of that, and create a charactor to loan money, than pass of the money to a friend and delete the charactor, but then the loaner guild may start only loaning to level 15+ charactors, as people wouldn't want to delete a semi-high level charactor they took the time to level. Just thinking out loud...

Why do you assume that dungeon masters have diametrically opposed interests to players? The trick is to find a system that works for both of them, not one-way. You don´t want dungeons as banks, or rewards per killed player, since that will only cause relentless optimising.

What you want to look for is a system that will reward dungeon masters by creating interesting, rewarding dungeons that are challenging and FUN. Give rewards to the DM based on how many people play his dungeons. Reward the DM for dungeons that are challenging, but not too hard.
A possible system would be to reward the DM according to the percentage of deaths/failures his dungeon causes. Too many and it´s not fun, too few and it´s to easy.

DMs also don´t need gold, and probably should be limited from the player gold economy altogether (problems of explointing easy dungeons will be pretty massive anyway). The DMs reward should be the ability to build better, bigger dungeons - which in turn will allow his dungeons to become more popular. MMOs are a lot about status.
And take the loot question almost completely out of the DMs hands - find a way to calculate an overall "Dungeon Difficulty" and assign loot based on that. Something along the lines of monster count x monster level would probably work, with some adjustemnts for group sizes and traps.

Any dungeon must also function without direct control from the dungeon master, naturally. He should be able to take part while there´s a party in it, but not to the extent that his presence is necessary.

Instead of having the player set the loot for a dungeon, why not have a ranking for the dungeon (set by players) that determines the loot.

This ranking can be based on many different metrics. Some of which might be:
1) Player votes (Favorite): The players vote for their favorite dungeon.
2) Player votes (Hardest): The players vote for the hardest dungeon.
3) Death/Completed ratio: Based on the number of (unique) players that enter the dungeon compared to the number of players that finish the dungeon (get the loot), could determine the level of loot that can be got.
And so on.

This kind of ranking could also determine what type of loot and for what class/race/specific build the loot is for. This can be taken from player stats when they vote or could be an actual vote topic in its self.

This system not only allows for player to build a dungeon, but also allows the comunity to set the loot that is availabel at the end of the dungeon.

The negative feedback loop that results from players trying to make their character unique (ie not let everyone have the uberloot) will make the better loot harder to get and if it is based on the metrics, then the good loot will also be in the more interesting dungeons.