TO CLEAR A FEW THIGNS UP: -I am only looking for feedback and suggestions, dont bother telling me what I cant do, or how much work is needed. -This thread is about a MMORPG that I am ALREADY Making, and I am sharing the ideals behind it with the community. -Alot of thought, talking, writing, and fighting has smoothed alot of details about this game, so the stated ideas are NOT all of them. Hello! I am currently working on a game that is called Ingosi, for now. The whole basis behind me and my friends making it is to Pickup where other MMORPGs fall short. Sound cliche? It really isnt, if you think about it. Dont get me wrong, There are alot of refreshingly different and inventive new MMOs, but not enough. A large thing missing from most, if not all, of current MMORPGs is a sense of ownership between the game and its users. Some games have taken a small approach by letting users create servers, maps, and other things. But they often use tools and programs that most users dont understand, or cant spare the time it needs to make a good product. Before I explain our solution, I have to explain how the base of the game works. When you first log on, all that shows up is a list of "servers" (not acual servers, just maps, I know its confusing, but if you have a better name tell me). You select one, it loads, and you continue on your way. Each map Is set up in a circular fashion. In the center is the "town" of each map. On the edge of town starts the wilderness, which get progressivly higher leveled as you go farther out. The bigger the town, the farther the wilderness goes. In the very center of each and every town is the same building. What building? The one that lets you switch servers, of course! Backing way up, our solution to a loss of ownership is to allow players to spend IN-GAME money to request a personal server, item, building for a server, etc. Request would be screened by a couple programs, then looked at by a real person and input into another program we have that generates the server, item, etc. Another aspect that is alot more touched apon by other MMORPGs is players characters themselves. Current games have systems that range from hundred of levels, obsene amounts of skills, Trillions of combinations of items, Massive visual character options, and a handful of other things. This is, I admit, our greatest fault. Our system Goes like this: Characters can choose to level up a handful of skills, with basics like melee combat, ranged combat, and spellcasting, but a few more obscure ones, like slight of hand(Can be used on NPCs and PCs) or bargaining(To lower costs from NPCs, and to fool with another system that suggests to players if a PC to PC deal is a good one or not). As players level the skills up, they gain spirit points. Spirit points can be used to gain small amounts of expirience in a specific skill, Influence items they own(to either a good or evil state), or make themselves more evil or good (Good items can only be made by a good character, and vice versa). The way the player plays the game also effect their characters faith, and becoming more and more good or evil can strengthen and weaken certain skills, as the same with evil or good items. This brings about the final subject I will talk about. The community of a game itself is what really makes an MMORPG what it is. Sure, you may have the greatest game in the universe, but if nobody plays it you dont really have a game at all. Most MMOs faulter at this very thing. When you start up the game for the first time, you go around and find something to do. For a while, killing mosters, leveling up, and finding new items can be fun, but you soon lose interest because nobody is talking to you, and you dont have anything to talk about. Our solution? Well, Its not that simple. Just like other games, our could have this very same problem. But, we try. When you first start the game, your faith is neutral, all your skills are at one, and so on. When people are talking near you, you can always "hear" them, no matter what stats your character has. But if a good character "shouts" something, only characters who are good can hear it. This also works with character level, to an extent. What this does is immediatly accociate good PCs with good PCs, evil PCs with evil PCs. Guilds will also be available for creation, and can differ in types. For instance, one guild may include both good and evil characters but only allow Rich characters. Another guild may have only one restriction, that all member must be evil. Finally, PvP. In the wilderness, PvP will almost always be on, but attacking characters of a way lower level will make you more evil, and helping people fend off other PCs will make you more good. When you get a high enough difference between two characters(which wont accually be that much of a difference), PvP is turned off between those two. Similarly, two good or two evil characters have PvP turned off, but can choose to duel, a controlled fight. Having said that, I will add that guilds can consider specific other guilds to be warring, and members can fight without regard to the above rules. Well thank you for reading all of that, and please comment with any suggestions you have, or if you want to know more about any part of the game.

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Original post by TheRubberBandit TO CLEAR A FEW THIGNS UP: The whole basis behind me and my friends making it is to Pickup where other MMORPGs fall short. Sound cliche?

Yesum! But don't be afraid of the cliches, cliches are goood.

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A large thing missing from most, if not all, of current MMORPGs is a sense of ownership between the game and its users. Some games have taken a small approach by letting users create servers, maps, and other things. But they often use tools and programs that most users don't understand, or cant spare the time it needs to make a good product.

I kinda get what you are saying, but I'm finding it hard to link this analysis to any MMOG's that I know. Perhaps you could give me some examples of a few games and how they could improve based on your system?

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When you first log on, all that shows up is a list of "servers" (not actual servers, just maps, I know its confusing, but if you have a better name tell me).

Shards. Origin-aly (boom boom) used by Ultima Online, I think is generally understood what you mean with this term.

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You select one, it loads, and you continue on your way.

So there is technically only one game service, with character and associated data shared across all maps? Perhaps not shards then. What you mean is literally a listing of maps.

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Each map Is set up in a circular fashion. In the center is the "town" of each map. On the edge of town starts the wilderness, which get progressively higher leveled as you go farther out. The bigger the town, the farther the wilderness goes.

This sounds neat, nice and simple. The only issue I can think of is that if you use this design exclusively you may be limiting the fun of exploration. Moving city locations around means players never know what to expect and your world designers have far more creative freedom to create interesting maps, which is perhaps both good and bad :).

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Backing way up, our solution to a loss of ownership is to allow players to spend IN-GAME money to request a personal server, item, building for a server, etc.

To be frank, this system sounds like it would fall down in a heart beat. I'll explain my reasons for doubting the overall design at the end (something to look forward to [wink]) but this functionality specificaly seems somewhat like giving a shotgun to a toddler. Perhaps you could explain how you limit access to this function and how you intend to sort viable requests from the thousands you'll receive each day?

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Our system Goes like this: Characters can choose to level up a handful of skills, with basics like melee combat, ranged combat, and spellcasting, but a few more obscure ones, like slight of hand

Not sure I understand, is this similar to the Diablo leveling system with a skill tree to specialize characters?

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As players level the skills up, they gain spirit points. Spirit points can be used to gain small amounts of expirience in a specific skill, Influence items they own(to either a good or evil state), or make themselves more evil or good (Good items can only be made by a good character, and vice versa). The way the player plays the game also effect their characters faith, and becoming more and more good or evil can strengthen and weaken certain skills, as the same with evil or good items.

Sounds neat. The only thing I question is the way you distribute these points. If players gain them for leveling, I guess they can spend them on either dark or light regardless of their actions? Also presumably you intend to have a sliding scale of abilities associated with the quantity of alignment points a player has, or is there some other benefit or use for them?

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When you first start the game, your faith is neutral, all your skills are at one, and so on. When people are talking near you, you can always "hear" them, no matter what stats your character has. But if a good character "shouts" something, only characters who are good can hear it. This also works with character level, to an extent. What this does is immediatly accociate good PCs with good PCs, evil PCs with evil PCs. Guilds will also be available for creation, and can differ in types.

Ok, this is good for sorting players into groups, but I think people are good enough at this as it is. In my opinion what you are actually suggesting here is a limiting factor, you are limiting the amount of communication available not enhancing it. How does an Evil and Good player ever have a confrontation if they can't speak? How do Evil and Good guilds role play without communication? Perhaps rather than limiting the communication between the two, you could provide each with their own chat channel so they have the option of private communication but default to public chat.

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Finally, PvP. In the wilderness, PvP will almost always be on, but attacking characters of a way lower level will make you more evil, and helping people fend off other PCs will make you more good. When you get a high enough difference between two characters(which wont accually be that much of a difference), PvP is turned off between those two.

Again, limiting interaction, why? The problem with PvP is not a difference in levels, it's that some people want it and some don't. As you have already said, higher level areas are geographically separate from low level areas, so why would drastically different leveled players be in the same area anyhow? This rule may interfere with guild combat and a myriad of roleplaying situations. The currently used alternatives seem far more effective. Let a player chose at the outset to be a PvP character or not, or just use clearly marked zones to turn PvP on and off - you'd need some trendy code to deal with combat that moves in and out of these zones though.

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Similarly, two good or two evil characters have PvP turned off, but can choose to duel, a controlled fight. Having said that, I will add that guilds can consider specific other guilds to be warring, and members can fight without regard to the above rules.

Noted, but not particularly satisfactory by my book.

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Well thank you for reading all of that, and please comment with any suggestions you have, or if you want to know more about any part of the game.

Overall the design is on the way to something nice I reckon, a few aspects are similar to my own which is why I felt compelled to reply. In many cases your design shows little forethought for the knock on affects of the various rules you are imposing. I'd encourage you to work hard breaking down rules rather than creating them and then look with an honest eye at how they will impact the game overall. Here's a few notes which didn't fit anywhere else.

You'll have to factor in the purchasing of maps / buildings etc into your economic model. It looks like a huge gold sink for high level players which is usually handy but be wary! Also, you suggest this system is a way for players to get some control over the world, but if your main limiting factor to the creation of these maps / buildings is money, then it's purely an end game feature.

With all these maps being available from the launch menu, how will you focus players in a particular area? Balancing population density is enough trouble for commercial MMOG's, how will people ever meet if they are spread out over x generic maps? This is an extremely important factor in your work to establish a community, what good is a nifty chat system if players are always alone?

The system as you describe it seems more suited to a sci-fi setting where each shard represents a single planet, with the central building being a starport.

And 'shard' probably isn't the correct term - that normally refers to an instance of the game world - you're more closely describing custom zone servers, or 'cluster nodes'.

In that form, it closely resembles starwars galaxies.

I'd strongly consider allowing linking zones to be arranged NSEW allowing your towns to be arranged on a 'grid' - you can keep the flexible size, providing your linking zone is larger than visual range. Whilst this would make it impossible to geographically map your entire game (since grid nodes are of varying size) it does allow characters to literally walk from town to town, which I think is important.

Business wise, the size of your world costs you money. Therefore you need to tie it to potential increases in revenue. Unless you're going to tie game money to real money (like Second Life et al) you should definitely consider zone creation a 'premium service', for which you charge a larger subscription (but allow for more characters from that account or something similar).

Under no circumstances should you allow servers outside of your control to host any node in your cluster (linked game instance). To do so is begging for trouble. Charge a higher subscription and provide the quality assurance your players will demand. People will argue for all sorts of code and data validation schemes, but it's simpler, cheaper and at the end of the day safer to retain control and pass on the expense as you are able.

Some thoughts...

1. What is the goal of your game? Why should it be more fun than other games from this genre?

In MMORPGs you need something like timesinks, because you dont have an ending.
What good works for this is.
- many(!) Items to collect
- faction systems
- very fun pvp-system with any kind of reward (dont have to be items, maybe a ladder or something like that)

2. You said that your evil'ness increases by killing lower players.
Doesnt that mean that all people that plan to play evil will start killing all lower players ?

I think you need here something to outweight it, is it bad to be evil? Do I get any benefits for being good? Or is this just a roleplay feature?

Try to prevent griefing here.


3. Server-Tools

What usually happens when you give players a tool to create their own maps, is that they will start creating maps to "cheat". Like mass monsters behind a cliff to kill them easily with your hero from a safe position.

So I think that you need here some "verification" of maps. Maybe you just give out the tools, make the maps testable at singleplayer, start a voting and the best 5 maps / month will make it in your online game.


4. Buying Server-Maps

A problem here would be, that you split the players. The MMORPG could transform in an Online Game where you meet sometimes another guy.

Maybe you just make it as a big money sink. The players may "rent" a special map/server for a week. This could also be calculated, that it is only affortable by guilds. Like: 10 players have to play about 30 hours each, to get back what they have invested.