I've been reading the forums here for quite some time and decided to finally register and post some of my own ideas. For the past few months I've been hammering out RPG concepts and I came down to this being the general idea, just looking for alittle feedback to see if anyone would find a game like this interesting/fun to play. It is an MMO concept but, at the moment anyways, is purely just a concept and I plan on developing it quite a few years down the road. I'm fully aware at how impossible that is, etc. but I'd like to try anyways and have been looking into possibilities. Anyways, this is all just general info.. I have alot more written down but like I stated earlier, I just want some quick feedback before I start bouncing ideas off. - Sci-fi setting - 3 races; magic based, tech based, and lastly a kind of.. lycanthrope, mutant race. - When you create a character, you will have a list of basic weapon types and armor styles to choose from that is based on race. ie: Longswords, Shortswords, Pole-arms.. etc. Some weapon types will be shared among all races but the general look of each weapon will be based on the race. - Now I don't know about alot of you but I'm fairly tired of playing games like WoW, where you're constantly buying new weapons and armor to augment your characters.. The idea I had is to have a system where instead of always getting new gear, you augment your current gear,. So instead of buying "Insertfantasynamehere's uber armor of pwnage" you will be gradually creating your own legendary armor. Inspired by DnD. - I've found that alot of the grind in MMOs comes from the fact that the combat systems aren't very engaging for the most part. In my MMO, I plan on having a more FPS based combat system. I know that implementing an FPS combat system for an MMO would present alot of challenges but I'd like to get some feedback as to if it would be even feasible. That isn't very good point form, since I kind of went into long paragraphs.. I always had that problem when writting notes back in highschool, but you get the general idea. There's alot more to my concept but I'll just shoot that out there for now and see what everyone thinks since I went alittle overboard in explaining some of it. I did my best to make it clear that I'm fully aware that you boys don't really like hearing about MMOs simply do to how impossible they are to develop for the indie game maker but that this is also just conceptual at the moment. Questions, comments welcome. Thanks in advance!

All sounds okay to me so far, and I don't think you've gone overboard in explaining at all. Your post is clear and legible.

Augmenting gear is one thing - but this rules out trader / crafter types existing since in order for them to exist items have to degrade / decay, unless of course your augmentations can be transferred from item to item (in which case they're behaving very much like skills or bonuses). There is a fairly hefty market in the crafter / trader portion of the MMO player base. This will increase as more detailed economic simulations come into play in mainstream MMOs.

FPS MMOs are feasible, and will become more so as infrastructure improves and cost of hardware declines. For an indie development however they will consistently prove problematic since the required update rate is much higher than for a turn-based or semi-turn based (traditional) system. Also close-combat is notoriously difficult to model in a distributed environment - most systems actually end up implementing something like a 4m range to hand-to-hand attacks with blantant misses being counted as hits and vice versa as dictated by to-hit rolls. Actual point-targetting (as in body parts etc) is currently too problematic due to simulation lag (in MMO situations), and is likely to remain so for the next few years at least, in my opinion.

Another big problem will be... cheaters.

Imagine someone uses an aimbot in an MMORPG. Ofcause there are tools to detect it, but there is always a way around your detection methode.

Then cheaters get really high advantages, because a "good" cheater will always be better then the best, "skilled" legit player.

Those cheaters are now able to farm high monsters easily, because monsters have to be adjusted that they are killable by normal players.

You both make some good points, I had a feeling that would be a problem so my back up idea was to have a sort of action adventure-esque battle system, something similiar to games like Fable, but alittle more refined. I'm just looking for a happy medium between a more twitch/skill based battle system and the traditional turn based rpg system. Something to make combat enjoyable, satisfying, and most of all engaging. Especially since it's 80% or more of what you do in an RPG... atleast online ones.

Oh, and to respond to your point about crafting, I've been trying to come up with a few ideas for that, I have one idea involving accessories but it still isn't quite enough to satisfy the types who really like to be able to make items... but I'll keep working on it.

Thanks for the feedback guys!